Where Do I Draw My Line?
by Killer Intent
Summary: Where does one draw their line? Lying, stealing, cheating, killing, loving? Is there anybody out there for the line to matter, or is it, sadly, our own invention with only as much meaning as we give it credit for? Main: NaruHina AU; Rating Changed
1. Chapter 1

_Blood quenches the body_

_Love blossoms even under snow_

_Blood can't sate the soul _

First he inhaled. His nostrils flared and he felt air and oxygen gushing, rushing deep into his chest. His abdomen clenched and he felt as if the air had went all the way down to his toes. As the used air fell back out of his throat and nose, mucus dribbled out and over his upper lip until he felt the cool liquid settle for a moment before it expanded across his lower lip. He sniffed and sniffed again and his fingers curled until he had them balled into angry fists. His hearing was shot, there was a ringing sound in his head like the noise one gets from a punch to the ear. It didn't quite sound like scratching or screeching, but something like vibration of a wire at an incredibly high vibration--maybe a humming sound. An 'Om' sound. He opened his eyes and saw that smoke and debris was in the air, and the calm forest path that he had stood in looked more like a site for mass slaughter.

Three bodies were slumped up against him and one was draped over him, and he only moved enough to check each of the faces of the shinobi lost to a cunning explosives expert.

He only recognized one of them, the woman on top of him: a woman he flirted with outside of the locker room at the ANBU faction's armory. Her clothes were singed and her hair was much darker than its normally cherry red color. Her name escaped him. The others were probably the jonin level chuunin that were admitted into the unit for peculiar reasons--three brothers. Their hair was singed off and the corpses were burnt beyond recognition. He met them when they were genin and helped them in their training after the first part of the chunin exams. They were part of a family that moved from the former hidden mist. Their rank no longer mattered after the attack to an outpost that maintained the main road out of the village and kept it hidden.

Orders were in. The massive genjutsu that was set around Konoha had cracked, and now Naruto and his group were the ones sent to recapture the outpost and remove the assailants and maintain camp until back up would arrive the next day to fix the genjutsu and the sensory chakra walls.

He looked around and saw two other bodies sprawled on top of one another. The area around them was devestated and drenched in black soot. The skies were dark like the ash on the floor, and the starlight was dim like far away candle light.

Naruto closed his eyes, and began to think.

On their way through the forest down the road, he had to wonder how a chunin had managed to get away from his foes to alert them when one attacker, on his own, was able to perform a coup de grâceon the shinobi that were in charge. That's what the frightened chunin claimed--and Naruto hadn't see any sort of deception in his pathetic eyes.

Then again, he wasn't a Hyuga.

He didn't like the idea of trying to sneak up on them, because he knew they would be waiting--and were probably expecting that sort of thing. He thought an unexpected violent attack would work much better, preferably one from the sky with the help of a few summon birds or Gamabunta, but his squad's leader was the one giving the orders.

Naruto really didn't like following orders.

He sighed and wrapped his arms around the woman's bare waist and formed a seal with his hands. "Ha."

The bodies blew up into large pumes of smoke, and in their place a team of ANBU were summoned to the battlefield around him, all prepared for the mission.

"Bear's been captured." He reported to his comrades.

"We need to hurry to keep any information from leaking out. We may have to select a new leader after this mission." Said a tall man in a tortoise mask.

"There's no chance that headquarters would allow us to decide on a replacement for the commander; moreover, this isn't a conversation we should be having just yet."

Naruto extended his arm out and held his palm flat. Each of his squad mates turned in the kunai he had assigned to them, which he gave to his shadow clones. They were normal kunai, but they were unusually worn and not fit for use as a shinobi's knife.

"We just became a squad a few weeks ago... we're a pretty big squad anyways."

Naruto looked at the man with the tortoise mask and saw that his eyes were blue. The tortoise was as sneaky as Kakashi. No one in their squad has ever seen his face, and he altered his voice on occasion--which threw off Naruto terribly. The man was not only a few heads taller than himself, but he was stocky like some of the men from the Earth Country's hidden village. Even Asuma would've been a head shorter than him, at least. His shoulder muscles were so defined that he wondered if he'd see swirls of flesh like in the gods and lion-faced ogres from the fables that were shown and read to him when he was much younger. Like his personality, his intentions and his face, his speciality was also unclear to Naruto. The man seemed to have an affinity to water type jutsu one day, and then the next he was using lightning techniques right after blowing flames into a crowd of enemies.

He couldn't feel comfortable around a man who was so concealed like he was.

One of the brothers yelled out, 'Yatta!' while another said, "That was pretty cool, Fox. How were you able to summon us...?"

The name 'Fox' was a joke that represented the tenant that dwelled inside of him. It was also his codename, since ANBU never called each other by their real names.

"All of you agreed to add my seal to your ANBU tattoo. It's my technique." He grinned behind his blank mask and stood upright. He strung and placed the worn kunai away in a black holster at his hip and started walking.

"Bear'll stay alive, but we must act quickly before our mission is compremised."

"I do believe that was a well-thought-out tactic in your position to plan ahead for the possibility of an ambush, although it was somewhat unorthodox to leave the commander in the dark by coming to us each individually before the mission, but it would be unwise to underestimate your commander. Bear is a jonin shinobi decorated with a few hundred missions and several awards presented by the council. My research implies that Bear was an integral part in the defense of the village during the snake-nin skirmish." The Aburame spoke, matter-of-factly. Naruto rarely got along with Aburame shinobi other than Shino, and this one was no different. He wore an eagle mask.

"Nor would I overestimate an ally. Like I said, _probably_."

The man in the tortoise ANBU mask smirked and the Eagle furrowed his brows.

"Don't you have any faith in your squad?"

He chuckled and knelt back down on the floor and shook his head. Bear was his friend, but idiocy and loyalty could only hold hands for so long. "Let's not go there. And by the way, you're a little less anal than most Aburame. They usually do their research _thoroughly_." Naruto chewed out.

The eagle masked man's head lifted up a little more and he stared at Naruto for an explanation for the insult.

"We just want to know what your problem with being in this squad is..."

Naruto's nails scraped the dirt floor.

"... so that we can work it out together." This was the woman who wore a bug mask--the same one he flirted with back in the village. He still couldn't recall her name.

"I won't follow anyone blindly."

She stared at him and saw him peer through the ivory mask with one of his eyes while he went through a short seal formation and then set his palms back into the earth. His eyes were still for a moment... and then he blinked.

"And yet you'll blindly follow your own moral code. Sometimes perspective helps solve tasks better than one's own skill, Fox-san."

"My will can cut steel."

"Sure, and so can an armorer's apprentice crudely mend it, but only the master knows of the real work and detail that goes into building useful weapons and armor."

"Why bother me with this right now when we should be focusing on rescuing this idiot?" Naruto summoned a scroll with a paint brush and a small canteen. He dipped the brush in and then slapped the end of the brush onto the scroll, leaving a blue splat, and looked up to her. "This post is an important tactical position for Konoha and the tri-alliance. With Kusa's sudden violent reaction to the end of Akatsuki and the release of the great vine, the shinobi from Kusa have managed to take over both of its surrounding countries, and is spreading its influence into both the ground country and the fire country."

"_The roots of Kusa are deep._" She spoke as if she were reciting an old moral code. Naruto, we don't need a history lesson." The bug-masked nin mumbled.

Naruto closed his eyes for a moment and remembered his old team. He saw the pink haired Haruno Sakura, the red eyed Uchiha Sasuke and the copy-cat nin, Kakashi, whose eye gave away the smile that hid behind his mask.

He rebutted her argument with his own quotation. "History not only encompasses threads of the past, but its fabric is woven in our future."

His squad members stared at him for a moment in silence, and then he continued. This moment, out in corpus fields, would be one that they would recount with their children and grandchildren, if they lived long enough. "As a 'decorated jonin', Bear carries vital information about the weaknesses of the village and of our shinobi that some of the current generation do not even know, not to mention an index on most of the techniques that Konoha shinobi use, thanks to the Hyuga family's ancient knowledge of the weaknesses of each of our clans. Bear'll have to be secured before we capture the post."

"Cutting the throat would keep that Hyuga from talking. I wouldn't have a problem with that." Said the tall man. Naruto just stared, his eyes and posture baring no emotion. The insect woman shook her head in shame.

"And here I was, defending teamwork."

The tall man knelt down in front of Naruto and the three brothers quickly followed suit, silent as he began evaluating their situation. Each of them looked up attentively at the blank mask of the fox, trying to soak in and understand as much of the plan as they could.

It was funny how much they adored him.

The Aburame and the bug woman stood behind them to watch over their shoulders.

_"Excuse me,"_began the Aburame, whispering to the woman standing next to him.

At that moment, Naruto briefly looked over toward the tower and muttered 'how did they do it?' to himself. The Tortoise tilted his head back a bit and leered down at the blond who looked like he had lost track of thought.

The fox shook his head and swiped the flat of his palm against the dirt.

"OK. Let's start. We came here to take the post back, not to lose anyone from our ranks. It's a large facility, so I have to make sure that none of you are going to get lost. I will break up the group into two teams. The infiltration team: the three of you and myself, and the sweeping team, the Miss'es, the Aburame and the tall guy. We have one-way communication with the outside through the microphones on our person, but once we're inside there's almost no way to call for help through these little receivers. Now, I'll tell you why." Naruto spoke well over the tone of voice that the Aburame with the eagle mask spoke in.

_"Yes?"_ She asked without turning to look at him.

"OK. Here's how it's going to go..." Naruto began by drawing a small diagram of the post, which was a small fortress designed as a war post back during the last great war. It looked small from first appearances, but it's true bulk was covered in dirt and a barrage of ancient trees that made up its surrounding forest. The "post" was its nickname and at the same time an underhanded blow, because it made the giant shinobi armory and training ground sound like it was three chunin in a short, two story building. Thanks to the elevation in the area, Konoha was able to convincingly hide a three story fortress underground, directly underneath the "post", and it once seemed impregnable and a testament to the hidden leaf's power and authority. Except, now it was captured by a team of unknown shinobi who literally destroyed the commanders that were stationed there.

The scary part was that a single man had infiltrated and killed the head shinobi in charge, and then his comrades came in and swept up the rest. He still wasn't sure that he believed the chunin that had escaped, and a seed of doubt had planted in Naruto's mind as he left the village that flirted with treason and betrayal in his head.

The Aburame could still see and hear Naruto, but that's just because the man's voice was so loud. He glanced briefly at the woman with the bug mask and whispered,_"By thoroughly, what did he mean?"_

She was silent for a moment as she organized her thoughts. While Naruto emphasized the brothers' role as the most important of his plan, she quietly shuffled backwards a few paces and responded in a whispering voice, _"Fox-san is the first genin to join in the ANBU service in or outside of war time. He's never passed his chunin exam, although it would be pointless to go back and attempt it now. If there were a rank above jonin and below Hokage, he would be it. I don't know all of the details, but I know that the class type of the missions that he went through to get to where he is now was of a much higher level than the commander's."_

The Aburame was silent for a moment, mauling the information over.

"_He's a sweetheart, really. I think he's just upset because he probably went to the commander with his plan in the first place, and more than likely he was just blown off. Insulting the fox is a foolish thing to do."_

_"I didn't mean to insult him."_

The insect glanced at the Aburame with some curious interest to his reaction._"Acting nonchalant about a superior of his who shows him no respect is definitely up in that category. He probably doesn't enjoy hearing about others accomplishments in reference to his own misconduct, especially since few under the Hokage level have experienced and accomplished as much as he has. Don't you remember the destruction caused by the man from that Akatsuki organization?"_

_"The total destruction of the village. I remember that Naruto's clones filled ground zero and were helping with the reconstruction of many of the buildings in the area."_

_"He fought that man from hidden rain--the man who caused us all of our grief back then."_

They listened quietly for a while as the Aburame tried and sort out his thoughts. _"So why is he only in ANBU? Why isn't he at least leading his own team?"_

She round-a-bouted that question and warned him. _"I wouldn't pester him. He doesn't trust many people, but--"_

"The reason why I don't is because my _friends _don't stop blabbing about me. Now shut up you two and come pay attention. Your roles are coming in and I can't hear myself think." Naruto grumbled.

Startled at his impressive hearing, the insect and the eagle stood side by side to listen to Naruto speak. He drew a basic diagram of the main entrances into the tower, and then mentioned that he needed Eagle's kikai bugs to sneak in and tag each of the enemies, then he would use his bugs to dig underground and climb in through the vents to get some information on the enemies while Naruto and the brothers started breaking into the underground fortress by digging underground through where Naruto remembered the armory was located using one of the brothers' ground techniques.

Bug was to rig each of the windows with explosives and cast a genjutsu over the main entrance after the brothers rushed in through the front. Each of them were given a kunai, except these were all deadly and well taken care of. Naruto wasn't sure if he should call them by their code names, but he couldn't really tell what type of masks they were wearing anyways. He thought one of them looked like a dog, and the other was probably a rat, or a rabbit. He didn't bother trying to decipher the image on the third brother's mantle.

Whoever painted these masks was retarded.

Naruto looked up at the giant tortoise, even though he was kneeling as well. "I've got one more thing for you to do while you're waiting for us to flush them out..." He looked back toward the tower that was engulfed by the large trees and the brush. He then turned back to the squad and nodded to them.

Naruto repeated in more detail that the fortress was made up of a tower, an armory, a large living quarters and a war/briefing room, as well as a few bathrooms, prison cells and other equipment rooms.

"After that, your job is simple. I'm going to take care of the night watch and replace them with my clones. I need you to be the final attack for when they all come rushing out and then guard the main route with your oil and fire traps. Bug will assist you with her ground affinity to build a prison for the stragglers."

"Actually, I'm a beetle. Should the trap cave be over or underground?" She asked, sweetly.

Naruto turned to start moving in a crouched position. "Under." He said. He moved a few more feet and his squad moved into position behind him. "I think there may still be a small incline as we get to the post, I can't really see it from here with all of those trees, but you might be able to hide it pretty well that way. Anyways, do what you think is best, Beetle."

Naruto lifted his left arm up and signaled them to hault, and while holding that hand up he extended his other arm out and signaled again to move. His squad looked confused until five shadow clones split up into a group of two on the left and a group of three on the right.

Naruto turned his head and nodded toward the Aburame. "Oi. Eagle. Get up here."

"Hai, Fox-san?"

Naruto looked up into the dark sky and muttered, "Just how high can those kikai bugs of yours fly?"

"And still remain under my control?" He asked, his brow furrowed in a slight quizzical manner.

"Didn't know you could lose control of your colony. But yeah, how high?"

"... Two hundred meters, exactly. They can continue flying high, more than ten thousand or so meters, but at that point I lose my reign over them and they usually swarm back to their normal climate."

Naruto looked curiously for a moment, "Not like it's that important to me, but what's their normal climate?"

"They originated from very arrid locations. I suppose Suna would be the closest place to attain more kikai bugs, but we are currently in full speed in breeding production. It is highly improbable that the clan will have to procure more specimen to continue our breeding projects. There are also reserves--"

"Shino would have stopped at 'arrid locations'. I suggest that you take care of the Aburame secrets more around other people--even those in your squad."

Eagle stared at him, but said nothing. Naruto nodded. "Here's the point: I need your kikai to fly up high enough so that they're not visible by our enemies. Then they should come down on the top of the tower and plant themselves there. I can reach a radio and break into our frequency once I reach the top of the tower. Come. Look..."

As Eagle followed Fox to a partition in forestry, the fox used his palm to push aside some tall blades of wild grass and wiry shrubs to show him the tower.

Eagles eyes widened.

They ducked, the rest of the squad leapt backwards and hid behind the bushes as a revolving beam of light passed over them. The walls on the top floor of the tower were made of glass, but there was a plateau that provided a blind spot close to the tower. The moonless night gave the ANBU squad an advantage. They could break in by dodging the spot lights that were on four sides of the tower, and use the blind spot to start building their traps. If need be, they could destroy the search lights and set up even outside of the blind spot.

"_Do all of you hear me?"_ He said, taking on a quieter voice.

_"Hai." _He heard the Aburame next to him say.

"Yeah!" All three of the brothers responded gleefully.

"_Shh! We hear you."_ The woman wearing the beetle mask chided the three, while the tall man gave a thumbs up.

_"Hm!" _

_"Alright, alright. Listen, my doubles will move into position soon. I need you all to move quickly. Tortoise, you'll have to find a way to conceal yourself long enough for your part near the end. If need be, I'll need you to help me knock down this tower."_

Everyone's breathing hitched.

_"Remember our secondary objective? The enemy **must not have this post**. I don't know if I can explain that any clearer than the Face said it, but you are top rated shinobi whose mission is to follow orders first and not ask unnecessary questions." _Naruto was silent for a moment. He continued after the light passed over them again. _"Bear needs our help. If we don't complete this mission, then a comrade will die. A hyuga is a prize posession for any enemy of ours--especially their eyes."_

_"This mission would be so much easier if we had those eyes on our side..." _The aburame agreed. He looked at his arm as more of his kikai bugs left their nest in his body. Their little wings flapped and they jittered about for a while before shooting up high into the trees and away from the light's imposing grasp.

_"Right. I can only plan ahead so far. I know how to get us in and what we have to do **if** we get out. I have no idea what's going to happen in there. Just keep in mind that they killed some of our superiors, not including all of the chuunin and genin squads that were stationed here. This **is **a certified training camp, not just an elaborate war room."_

_"Forget the unexpected... we're in a whole 'nother shit storm from here on out." _One of the brothers whispered back in an odd tone.

_"Right. Anyways..." _The spot light passed over them once more and suddenly Naruto bolted away from the shrubs and followed the revolving light in its quick, predictable pattern around the base, with two clones on his tail.

Naruto's voice broke out over the radio, "_Begin step one."_

After the light passed over them again, the squad saw the other group of three blonds follow the second beam of light, staying just out of its path like their original had. The squad had to force themselves to move after the third beam had crossed over; they were so surprised by the speed that the fox was capable of that they nearly forgot to move. The first to get up was the tortoise, and the brothers soon followed him.

Eagle was surprised when they arrived at the base of the tower and the clones had already henged into the patrol walking around the entrance and had them all knocked out, tied up and gagged. They wore no hitai-ate, but they all wore konohagakure's symbol, tattooed on their arms. Naruto had managed to get every detail of their clothing just right, including the dense chest plates and armor material around their forearms and shins, as well as the way they tied their hair and probably even the color of their eyes. He couldn't quite see clearly enough in the dark, but beetle was gawking at them.

"They are wearing the hidden leaf on their shoulder... what does this mean?" Eagle asked.

"I... I don't know." She looked back at their other team mate, who looked down upon them quietly.

The trio of brothers looked confused, and one eventually spoke up.

"Oi, I thought that we were supposed to--"

"_**Zzsht~**c'mon you three. You're supposed to go through the front door, remember? I won't be able to give any more orders once I go in, so you guys better remember what you're supposed to do~**zzt!!**"_

The three brothers formed several seals in unison and suddenly their chakra could be felt among the rest of the group. "We're ready."

"Just wait for us, onii-chan."

"Let's go!"

"You're too loud!" Chided the beetle woman again.

"What an awful sound, that radio." Eagle complained.

"It's better to have some way of communicating... I see that hill that he was talking about. It wraps around the edge of the clearing over there where those trees peak high above the rest. The light shouldn't be able to spot me if I work fast enough and raise that hill up just a bit..."

"I have something I have to do... make sure you get those windows, like he said." The tortoise started walking toward the wall of the tower and suddenly he disappeared.

"I will, thanks." She said, pulling out a roll of explosive tags from her kunai pouch.

"My kikai have already begun to infiltrate the base. It will take three minutes for them to reach the second basement floor."

"**Zz~**Sounds good. I'm going in**...kshhh...**"


	2. Chapter 2

**Disclaimer:** I don't own Naruto.

Chapter 2

A group of men barring the entrance to the staircase were bored, chatting away as they waited for some action. They talked about Konoha's part in the world and the part they themselves would play. They spoke of great aspirations and of their families, or of new techniques they wanted to learn and the wealth and power that would be theirs if they toppled Konohagakure. There were four of them, so when Fox first heard their voices, he had already stooped down into a low crawl where his chest almost brushed against the floor each time he moved. The men who guarded the Fox's intended path had no idea that he was coming upon them. When finally he was ready, the fox wrapped his arms around the neck of one of his victims while his clones followed suit for the other three. Four necks were snapped as four strangled cries broke out; four bodies were then quickly squirrelled away into the dark corners of the room where even the lights overhead held no authority.

He entered the underground base with his two squads of clones at a pace suitable for a fox. The corridors were dark and winding--concrete passages that were dank from being pressure washed often. Obviously, its last wash was probably sometime before the attack to the base, but he could still feel the moisture in the air together with the scent of dirt and grass after a storm shower. His nose picked up on that and more, including the foul odor of left over, rotting food and blood. His foxy nose could even pick up the scent of old decrepit death, and the thought popped in his head that the bodies were probably not moved very much after the men and women from the village were killed. He only caught glimpses of the corpses strewn about the hallway; he never had to turn his head to see the blood that caked the walls or feel it under his shinobi's sandals. It was everywhere.

"There's needles in some of these bodies... poison plus sheer volume of puncture wounds probably got them, since the aim is sort of off." One of his clones said.

"It's nothing like that boy with Zabusa. One shot was good enough for him."

"Haku... It's been so long. You remember that?" Fox asked his clone.

"Sure. I remember everything that you remember." He said.

Fox didn't bother to nod, he only stooped lower as his speed picked up.

The clones followed behind him in an arrow formation as he ran passed room after room. Each of them checked a room on their side of the arrowhead, but found only supply rooms and makeshift sleeping quarters for new recruits when the regular quarters were used in full capacity, so they continued on. They were heading toward the armory, where the brothers should have broken through to after entering the ground-level floor of the 'Post' just like he diagramed outside.

Those brothers, they had a special **_group kekkai genkai_**, which would only work when the three of them were together--which immediately lead to them being placed in a three man cell. It was a very unusual power that they had stumbled on together. It was the reason why they were called 'Jonin-faced Chunin'. Their father wasn't anything special, but their mother was a powerful shinobi who once claimed the hidden leaf as her village, though he had a feeling that she was either born or living around the time of the first hokage. Fox didn't know much more about her, but he knew that she had a part to play in the original disbursement of the demons that lead to their _coincidental _placement throughout the continent. In theory, that meant that she had a part to play for the Kyubi's appearance in Konoha eighteen years ago. She may still be alive. He wasn't sure.

Now orphans, the brothers wanted to find their mother as well, but not for the same reasons that Fox had. Fox needed to know some things about the Kyubi; secret things that he didn't understand and the great fox wasn't willing to part with.

The fox sighed gently as he pressed his back against the wall next to the large door frame that lead into the armory. Already he could smell blood and the scent of foreign men, as well as a lingering taste in his nostrils of alcohol.

Then, while taking a rumbling from up above as a cue, the fox gingerly peered through the large frame to see how many shinobi were there, staring at the shuddering ceiling, waiting for the brothers to collapse the roof.

_One hiding in the far corner, seven in the middle, eight others heading this way. That doesn't include the people I can't see from here.__ I don't have enough back up to take out the group in one blow, but I should still be able to do it stealthily._

The fox took a deep breath and looked up to analyze the distance between the top of the frame and the ceiling. As this whole segment of the base began to shake because of the powerful earth jutsu that the brothers were using, Naruto could hear shouts of orders being given amongst his enemies.

Nodding his head, two other clones followed him as he ran straight up the wall and crawled over the short space over the door frame to get onto the other side. When all three of him landed in position, they all pressed up against the wall and waited, kunai drawn.

He watched quietly with his lips sealed and his eyes trained on the heels of his targets. One could tell quite a bit from the amount of tension that was on the heel of an opponent. His favorite thing to see was the flat-footed run, a sign that the target was getting careless either because he was more relaxed than usual, or the target was scared.

After the third shinobi had passed through and the fourth finally noticed one of the groups, the Fox group lunged out from both sides and struck their knives through the front of their throats, quickly collapsing the esophagus and completely destroying the jugular and carotid blood vessels. The stretched position of these blood vessels often reacted terribly for medic-nin or any other medical professionals when treating this sort of attack. They sat underneath the platysma muscle that kept the neck packaged firmly in place while still giving way somewhat to allow a little less than a crescent motion so that one could turn his or her neck back and forth. Sitting there, however, in a vertical position allowed for the elasticity of the vessels together with gravity to hide away the cut vessels under the muscle, which meant that most people never survived a slit throat. The few that have thanks to powerful chakra techniques or freezing methods often suffer brain damage due to lack of oxygen to the brain.

Fox learned exhaustive amounts of information during his four month training stint for ANBU. They didn't give him much time to pass the tests, but he was at an age where everything clicked. He was absorbing every bit of information thrown at him and asking for more. He learned by doing, by hearing, by seeing, by thinking about it later--it was incredible, he realized, how much he could learn when so much focus was on **him**. It wasn't like the academy at all. He 'graduated' near the top of his shinobi class in the ANBU academy.

The last two shinobi that were not killed in the first two seconds after their initial lunge were held captive after new **remote-activated** **explosive tags **were attached to their foreheads and kunai were brought up to their throats. Within eight seconds, the path was clear, and anyone looking in their direction would barely be able to see the gleam of light off of the blood on the floor by the entrance to the armory.

No one was, though, because now they had a new threat beyond the collapsing roof to deal with. A large monster made of chakra and a small dark blue orb resting in its center crashed through the ceiling wielding a giant rock pillar on the end of a samurai-sword's handle, with a shield made of fire in the shape of bull's head. Every time the creature swung his pillar and struck down one of theshinobi, the pillar broke up more and more until only rubble was left.

Two shinobi moved up close and caught the brothers' attention while their allies moved back and began complex hand seal formations. Fox recognized the sequence and frowned. He needed to trust the brothers' abilities and move on. They were supposed to catch up to him later, otherwise they would risk the hostage getting executed. He growled and left one team to help break down the numbers, leaving his own slightly handicapped.

He and one of his clones quickly used wraps secured in their pouches to cover their captives' eyes and both kicked them into the room at the same time. As soon as they stumbled close enough to a crowd of their allies, Naruto activated the seals and turned to leave as two large explosions engulfed half of the room. He darted down the hall like light, appearing at the end of it just in time to turn his head slightly to the right and look back. The last he saw of the brothers before he turned a corner far away from the armory was the pillar of rock shattered by a lightning jutsu that he had seen coming, and a powerful roar like that of a lion in place of their fused three voices as the trio slammed their chakra body, shield first, into one of the stronger shinobi as his clones attempted to take care of the ranged fighters in the midst of all of the destruction.

He reached behind him and started molding chakra in each hand while running at the same speed. The two clones left over with him helped shape the chakra into **Rasengan **spheres as they neared a wall that they needed to go through to cause confusion in the ranks of the shinobi that had taken over the base.

When the wall collapsed and the ceiling shook, the men inside started moving quickly as they geared themselves back into a state of awareness one possesses while out on the battlefield. When they saw a man in a clear mask running solo with two bunshin behind him some of the men broke out into fits of laughter.

Fox stepped in cautiously, but allowed his clones to do the eye-sweeping of the room.

A man wearing blue and holding two small fans and several other pairs on his back stepped up to face the white-faced ANBU. He had thick, dark hair and blue eyes, and the odd suit that he was wearing billowed up near his calves, and continued on toward his ankles much like tights do.

"I'll handle this. Watch out for any stray spray." He grinned, wasting no time and turning his body and swinging both fans upwards in one swift motion. Hundreds of small needles shot out from within the folds of the fans as they opened up. The fox stood still as the needles raced toward him. He could be sure that they were poisoned, regardless of this shinobi's rank. The clone mentioned before that there were needles in some of the bodies, but he was confident that the rain-type attack was as inaccurate as always.

Just as the needles were about to dot his body like the night sky dotted in infinity with bright stars sitting in suspension two straight swords came out from behind his back and spun in counter rotations, effectively defending the group of foxes much to the man's chagrin. The needles ricocheted off and dug into the floor around the foxes. They hit at nearly the same speed, and the sheer volume of needles used in the attack brought up smoke from debris broken off of the floor around them that seemed to swirl up high into the air and then drape over the center of the room.

"Think you're bad-ass, huh? Leaving it all up to your kage bunshin--what a cocky son of a bitch. Let's see you dodge this.." He leaned backward and removed the top two fans at his shoulders. Where each fan sat hanging, an extra arm grew out and took hold of it at the same time; taking all of his arms and rolling his shoulders he hunched back forward on the balls of his feet as he flaunted his ability. "You like!?-- there's so many needles that there'll be ten in between each of your teeth!"

Fox's eyebrows lifted up underneath his mask, but he stood his ground. There wasn't any point in losing his cool over an attack like that. He moved his hands together to form a hand seal as he waited for it.

The fan shinobi held out his arms in a very complicated manner as he readied himself to throw the needles toward the fox. The rest of his allies standing around, waiting for the outcome started yelling when they noticed that somehow a white-faced clone had managed to sneak into place behind them in the smoke brought up from the first attack.

When the man felt some arms quickly latching onto his side just above his waist, he looked down to see half a grinning face as the clone's mask was pushed aside slightly and a small roll of remote-activated explosive tags hanging out of his mouth. His eyes widened when the clone's arms reached up and grabbed as many of the shinobi's extra arms as possible and pulled back while holding the exploding seals in between his teeth. Fox molded chakra and activated the seals.

The clone closed his eyes and furrowed his brow and the spider-armed man let out a scream, but it was engulfed by an explosion so large that it knocked several of the other ninja in the room off of their feet. The other clone, who stepped out from behind Fox as the explosion occurred, swung both swords in his hands to deflect the light spray of needles that were flung in their direction by the explosion and sheathed one of them as the second disappeared into a plume of smoke while sitting in his hand.

A memory of the explosion from a different perspective came to him, and the fox immediately started running forward, and then used chakra to throw him into a wild burst of speed that allowed him to move on toward the hallway that lead up to the war room past the destruction that had occured in the barracks.

As the smoke cleared and the rest of the shinobi that weren't already dead brought themselves back up to their feet, ready to chase after the ANBU in the blank mask, a giant pillar slammed down fiercely on the corpse of one of their fallen allies. There was a sea of shaking lips and wide eyes in the room as they gazed upon the brothers. The mighty beast made of chakra with a weapon made of rock and a shield made of fire took a few steps forward, swinging the pillar violently, roaring like a beast not of this world.

They all ran screaming.

A flood of shinobi trying to escape the terrible dominion of the large pillar and the wrath of the chakra monster as it chased them down a long hallway that lead directly to the entrance, and the only other one besides the one that had been made by the brothers earlier. As they climbed the stairs and exited the front of the Post, they hesitated for a second when they saw another hallway made of swirling flames and an uncertain end before them.

The heat from afar was already painful, and they knew that before the ring of fire was there, there used to be grass and a few shrubs straight away from the exit. Now the ground was torched, and it did not look like a direction that they wanted to take.

Behind them, the beast was forcing its way through the narrow staircase, destroying the railing and almost crashing the entire floor down, but he would certainly manage to get through, they could already see his giant arms reaching out and the claws on the end of them.

They started running, nearly single-file into the pit of hell as they tried to escape from the monster that wanted to grind them up with the pillar and cook them with his shield to make shinobi burgers.

When they finally broke through the flames and climbed over a hill, the ground suddenly separated into two giant lips made of the very Earth herself that gently suckled them into her mouth. They even felt as if they were being thrown about along a firm, grassy tongue and pressed into the sides of rock teeth and soft dirt gums. In the pitch black darkness within the mouth of the dirt, they noticed that there were several eerie glowing lights surround them. They fluttered around like bugs, and crawled all over them, and soon, they realized that these were the Aburame clan's kikai bugs, and that they were trapped.

Only a few of them dared to move close enough to the teeth, but when they did they could see the three shinobi standing in front of them alongside the monster.

From the side, the Beetle's jaw could be seen moving as she shifted the mouth prison, but she stayed quiet as to not let their prisoners escape, for their prison maintained its shape so long as her jaw did as well. The tortoise stood with his arms crossed in front of the flaming pathway that slowly faded away in the background and Eagle cradled a few of those glow in the dark kikai bugs that had been bred with the sole intention of freaking their enemies out--aside from their glutenous hunger for chakra. The brothers split back up into three and each were grinning madly behind their masks.

"Looks like we did our part. He said there shouldn't be that many more, and that he could take them, but..." Eagle said.

"He's missing four clones now," said one of the brothers.

"So he's practically on his own. I guess he's not the only ANBU with a mask like his for no reason, right? We can trust him." Another brother pitched in.

"On his own?" Tortoise smirked and turned to head back into the tower. "If there's one thing you learn from fighting with a beast like Uzumaki..."

The woman in the beetle mask gave the tortoise a glare.

"--it's that he's never on his own."

One of the brothers moved closer, "Because, we're like... with him in spirit and stuff?"

Eagle gawked at the little one--Beetle snickered, and a girlish chorused screech came from prisoners within the large set of lips protruding out of the ground a few meters away. Tortoise shook his head, grumbling. "Damn fool."

"He's just a kid, you know." Eagle pointed out.

"OK, Lion... like I was saying, the Fox is never alone on the battlefield, because he is a master of a technique called Kage Bunshin no Jutsu."

"The shadow clone technique, I know that..." The youngest of the three in a lion's mask mumbled.

Tortoise ignored his pouting and got to the point. "I remember the first time that we fought together against that group of samurai from the west."

"Samurai?" Another of the trio asked, this one wearing a mouse mask.

"That's right, samurai. But these demons were far superior in numbers and their ability rivaled even that of the Hyuga clan head. We were definitely in trouble then."

"What did you do?" Mouse asked.

"Nothing."

_"Nothing...?"_

_"Nothing."_

The two boys were struck silent, while the third wearing a badger's mask had still yet to talk. They couldn't stand the anticipation, and the tortoise had yet to divulge the information they so desperately needed.

Tortoise narrowed his eyes, remembering the cries on the battlefield as explosive tags were launched on kunai to attack the powerful invaders. It was an army of samurai, and their armor seemed impenetrable. Only their strongest jutsus were able to damage their armor. They wielded devilish katana that not only absorbed chakra but also expelled it, which meant that they had to time their attacks and work together to both distract, attack and defend. The energies radiating from those unearthly attackers was evil, but that didn't stop Konoha's shinobi. The leaf shinobi were proud, and had faced much greater evils before, such as the Kyubi no Kitsune and Pein. They fought for a long time, and Tortoise happened to be one of the mercenaries hired for the battle, but even fighting alongside other great shinobi like the former _Rookie 9 _and Team Gai, there was very little hope in sight. When Hyuga Hiashi was struck down, the whole leaf fleet came to a miserable hault, and practically begged to have their souls withdrawn as payment for their cowardice. One of his most vivid memories was that of the ferocity displayed that gained Bear the ANBU title after that fight.

"I couldn't do a damn thing, and neither could Bear or any of the other regular leaf-nin fighting that night. It wasn't until Fox stepped in and asked for us to buy him some time. I thought he was such an arrogant bastard then. Still think he's one now." Tortoise mused.

"Did Uzumaki eliminate them?" The badger finally spoke up.

"Yeah. All of them."

"All..."

"Once he told us he was ready, it took him six hours to defeat them all, but not once did he allow any more of his comrades to fall. The rest of us left alive the following morning thanks to him."

"How did he do it?!" Lion demanded.

Mouse said, "That was before we were chunin, right? Tell us!"

"He called on his shadow clones and a chakra even darker and more sinister than those samurai. I blinked some sweat out of my eye and suddenly there was a mighty flood of clones that dismantled the samurai armor piece by piece. He did it all with his **bare hands**."

"You're romanticizing the story," Beetle mumbled between gritted teeth.

"No I'm not. You were there, what happened to your head, woman?"

Beetle kept silent.

"Hm. Either way, he's not going to leave me out of all of the fun. And I'll be there to make sure that he doesn't go soft on Bear."

The three brothers were exhausted, and after looking toward the Beetle's shaking head they took a vote and decided that it was best that they just sit and rest. Eagle, however, got the go ahead and nodded back. He ran up after the tortoise and then followed him in behind him.

"I hope Fox and Bear come back out okay..."

"Me too."

Deep inside of the base, past the long hallway and the destruction caused by the roll of explosive tags, Fox stood at the end of another hall at a door. He looked around briefly before stepping in before his clone. A trap set and a giant slab landed on top of the clone behind him, effectively crushing and expelling him and the technique respectively. The fox frowned, but started walking a little deeper into the already dark room to where he thought he saw someone sitting on a chair in front of him. It seemed like there was no leaving this place the way he came.

A light turned on, forcing his eyesight to adjust, and he saw Bear sitting on a steel chair, tied down with bulks of fine threads that looked suspiciously like hair wrapped intricately around her throat and slender waist, as well as each one of her joints and finally a few times to the chair. He looked around, noting that there was no one around him, and figured that this was a ploy to attack him, but wanted to come close to his comrade anyways, to see if she was breathing.

He took a step closer.

Nothing.

Another step, and yet again, nothing.

He continued until he stood over her, looking down upon Bear. He held his breath as he removed the mask.

"You've made it this far--Uzumaki Naruto? Are you here to kill me?"

Fox narrowed his eyes, but finished pulling the mask away from her face.

He stared down into the pearl-white eyes of the heir and soon-to-be-pronounced leader and head of the Hyuga clan...

"You're safe now, Hyuga-taichou."

... Hyuga Hinata.

**Author's note:** I figured this was a pretty good place to stop, plus I need to go to work seven minutes ago! :) Thanks for reading, and please review! Next one should be longer.


	3. Chapter 3

_**Author's note: **This is a disclaimer. I do not own Naruto. _Often, you will see text _"like this_." That generally means that the characters are whispering, or talking in a raspy or low voice.

_**Characters::**_

**Bear**: ANBU Captain. Born Hyuga Hinata and heiress to the head of the Hyuga clan. Her father was killed a little less than a year ago during an attack on Konoha. Her furious attack against the army of devil samurai after Hiashi's death gained her the title of captain to her ANBU squad. She had opted to join the ANBU ranks after attaining jonin rank rather than fight for her right to be the head of the clan. She lives with a constant fear of being assassinated, and finds trusting even her closest friends and loved ones impossible to do. The current leader of both the ANBU and Ne (Root) is known only as 'The Face', although no one has ever seen his face; Bear has long since been wary of the powerful ANBU warlord and tries her best to tiptoe around him and his orders, sending others to retrieve her missions for her, sending reports by air summons, citing that she has important clan business to tend to when called on to attend gatherings and summons.

**Fox**: ANBU second in command in the squad, born Uzumaki Naruto; he is an aggressive, calculative fighter. His temper is the reason why it has taken so long for the face to promote him. His strongest technique is the Rasengan, but his most versatile one is Kage Bunshin no Jutsu. He is a powerful shinobi, but his biggest strength comes from the love he has for his comrades--although sometimes its hard to tell that he loves any of them at all. He once claimed that if it weren't for his nin-do--to protect all of his precious people--he wouldn't be as powerful and lucky as he was. His outlooks of the people and of Konoha, however, have become pretty grim. His power comes from his knowledge and ability in utilizing the Kyubi no Kitsune's chakra, although his own chakra reserves are still deeper than all of the other shinobi in Konoha.

**Eagle**: An Aburame Jonin who joined the ANBU ranks as a bodyguard for international relations. He doesn't know much about Fox because of the long training that he underwent in the Aburame's underground compound, where they breed Kikai bugs with different traits together to get various breeds with mixed properties. He has already met Bear without her mask before through Aburame Shino, her team mate and also one of his cousins. He hasn't shown it yet, but he feels at ends with Fox because he never has an open ear for the kikai-user's plans, although, if he were to admit anything about the fox it would be that he can be a very quick thinker when the situation presents itself.

**Beetle**: A woman who often flirts with Fox when they are off duty, but she is quick to prove that she isn't just a pair of nice legs. She specializes in ground jutsu, but she is also a very skilled field medic. She has a technique that is unique to her. It is a manifestation of her body in the ground that she controls with her chakra. She is also able to connect nerves to the ground using chakra so that she is able to feel what her projected body is doing and 'feeling'. The giant copy usually follows her exact movements if she gives it enough flesh. She can conserve chakra quite a bit if she leaves the technique unmodified, but she can also remotely control her dirt copy without moving herself, which can be useful for concealment purposes, although it drains much more chakra. Ever since she first joined ANBU and wound up in Bear's team, she finds herself deeply in love, but will not dare speak up for fear of rejection.

**The Brothers, Lion, Mouse and Badger**: The brothers have been a cell for only two years and have accomplished more than most shinobi of their rank. Their techniques are based on old chakra 'magic' that easily and safely takes two or more types of chakras and fuses them together to create a carrier that they travel inside of while in dark blue chakra orb that makes up its center. The chakra doesn't easily deflect regular objects like steel weapons, but it is a very effective shield against most jutsu. Well placed techniques like lightning chakra strikes can destroy parts of the construct. Because of their powerful group jutsu, they are often called "Jonin-faced-chunins" as a joke within ANBU and higher-ups in the village. The three boys are orphaned, and young, and their mother is a legend among the ANBU ranks. It is said that she was an active shinobi when the first Hokage was in power.

**Tortoise**: A giant of a man who is only a head or two shorter than the construct made by the chakra bros. He is a bit of a mystery to Fox, but at the same time he often implies that he has a deep respect for the blond shinobi. He thinks little of the Hyuga heiress, and even commented that he would be willing to kill her if necessary--later on he mentioned that he would go back into the fortress to make certain that Fox wasn't going soft on the girl. Tortoise rarely shows off his abilities, but when he does it is usually a spectacular ordeal.

**And the story so far**... _Fox, or Uzumaki Naruto has entered what looks like a small interrogation room in search of his captain, Bear, who is also known as Hyuga Hinata; his ANBU captain is strapped down to a chair by strange 'chakra rope' that tightens everytime he tries to loosen it. The rest of their group is either waiting outside or making their way inside right at this moment._

Fox stalked through the darkness, his eyes peering through his mask to gaze into her eyes.

"You're safe now, Hyuga-taichou." He said, pulling aside the indigo-colored hair covering Hyuga Hinata's pale face. She batted her eyes weakly at him, her pupils staring past him toward the ceiling.

"I thought the face wanted me dead... I thought that you were working for him. I thought **you** wanted me dead, for--"

"_Shh." _He pressed his thumb against her lips and shook his head. He saw the look of distrust seeded deep into the furrow of her brow. It was only natural, for she would become the first female leader of the Hyuga clan and there was no elder still alive that felt she should be given any authority over them. Her mind must have been twisted and wrapped around that sole thought--rotting and decaying like some sick little creature left outside with only the vultures left to accompany her. She stared through him with those deep prying eyes; they were crater-less moons dancing brighter than even the stars above.

He prolonged the glance that to him felt fleeting, his body aching with every fibrous strand in his body deep down into the nerves that made up the complex system of sensations and responses that gave man an idea of what something _beyond what words can express_ must feel like. He drifted on winds of bliss when he saw the slightest of twinges at the ends of her mouth and the relaxation of her brow that signaled to some primal state of mind that in some way his pathetic attempt to pacify her had managed to do just that.

Fox was silent as he pulled gently on the hair-like bindings around her shoulder. They tightened under his grasp, so he released them and they returned to their original state. Her eyes finally locked onto his, and she never let go after that. She'd die staring into his eyes if she had to.

"But you do, don't you? _Don't _you? Don't you, Naruto-kun?" She asked desperately, her chest puffing out just a bit as she struggled against her bindings, which surprisingly did no harm to her. It sounded like she almost wanted him to be the one to do the deed.

Fox brought a kunai up close to the hair, but quickly retracted it when he saw it tighten up even worse. Hinata flinched and shuddered from the brief pain. He was glad that he had chosen the shoulder and not the throat to begin his prying.

"It looks like it's very sensitive to metals. Let me see those pretty eyes."

He smiled and she shuddered. It was his way of asking her to activate her byakugan. Hinata blinked her eyes as vein-looking protrusions in her skin suddenly appeared, and she nodded. Her eyes seemed to be solely intent on gazing into his when she said, "I'll say when."

Fox nodded. The ropes of hair must have chakra running through them, he thought correctly. He extended his middle and index finger and concentrated wind chakra into them. After a brief moment of controlled chakra churning, he looked into her eyes and waited for the nod of her head as he continued to pile more chakra into the wind blade.

"It's sharp enough... try the one here by my throat."

He nodded slowly and reached over to press his fingers against her throat, only they stopped just a second before while thin strands of hair began snapping as they were cut.

"A little more to the left." She said. Her eyes were staring back into his, but he knew that she was looking through her Byakugan.

"OK."

"Press it in deep... _there_."

"Here?"

"Yes."

"This is gonna take forever..."

"Yeah..."

"So who else is left?"

"I'm not sure. One man took over this base and the rest of them just sort of congregated here."

"One man?" He asked, eyeing her with a raised eyebrow.

"Yeah. He has the ability to snuff out kekkai genkai. I don't know how it works, because I can never see it long enough with my eyes to figure it out. The Hyuga on post as the look outs didn't even see him coming. They probably just thought there was something wrong with their eyes."

"So that's how he got you."

"No. The explosion is what got me, silly."

"You know what I mean. I didn't think that they could keep you contained once you woke up. You're Hyuga-Freakin'-Hinata, no one gets to touch you without some repercussions... which is why I'm gonna do this." He leaned forward and gave her right buttocks a squeeze, grinning into her ear as he did.

"Oohmf! You ass."

"You didn't even put up a fight, did you?"

Hinata smirked, "Of course I did. I had already taken out the two goons that were dragging me away, and I was about to go for the kill shot at his throat, but when I realized that my eyesight had changed back to normal, I was thrown off a little and he spun out of the way just in time to wrap his arm around my throat and secure a lock on me. Fucker couldn't keep his hands off me, and I tried to attack him, but in the end his grabby hand was all an attempt to trick me into wasting all the air I had left and I fell unconscious. Woke up here when I heard that giant slab crash down where your clone was."

Fox nodded slowly and shushed her as he leaned in close as the work on the rope around her throat got a little more dangerous as more and more strands were sliced away.

He could feel sweat on his brow as he tried his best not to cut too hard or too quickly, because either one could lead to disaster. She stared up into his eyes, breathing out her mouth in soft, sexy gasps that made his toes curl as he worked.

Then, while he was leaning his finger gently against the rope, she whispered something too softly for him to hear, and then his concentration slipped.

They both gasped, but Fox desperately prayed that it wouldn't be her last.

"Hinata!" He looked at the tips of his fingers that had gently tapped her left jugular artery with only the slightest of pressures like that of a falling leaf. He looked at her skin and stared into her eyes with fear--a fear that had totally enveloped him worse than darkness or loneliness or spite ever has. She stared at him as if something had caught in her throat, but her eyes never wavered. _"Hinata!_ Say something!"

"Oh... Naruto-kun. You're too soft, as always." She said. Her arms wanted to strangle his waist, but she was only able to lean her head forward and rest her cheek upon his quivering chest.

"_God, Hinata_. You idiot. I thought I had killed you." He laughed but the breathless way he had done it made it clear that him almost taking her life was anything but funny.

"You fool. There's no way I'd let you kill me so easily. You'd be so lost if I left you on your own. You think you'd be able to run a squad like this one all on your own?" She whispered cutely to him.

He laughed again, this time a little more heartily.

"I'd run you." He said, giving her a playful snarl.

"Is that a challenge, or a fantasy of yours?"

He smirked, "A little of both."

"Sounds like my type of game... we should get out of here."

He nodded and began pulling away the rope strands from her body. "Oh, I wasn't sure if you even wanted to... I mean, you're all ready tied up, saves us the trouble of having to go through this again when we get back home."

"You _nasty _little perv. Don't tell me that you talk to Eri-chan like that?"

"Eri? I don't know who that is."

She frowned. "Don't act like you don't know who I'm talking about. For kami's sake, she's on your squad."

"Beetle's name is Eri? Wow. Didn't think you'd be the one to tell me."

Hinata's frown deepened. "You've been flirting with her for at least a month."

"Hey, it's not only me. Besides, why are you so concerned with who I fraternize with?"

"_You_ concern me." She replied truthfully.

Fox stared into her eyes for a while as his hands stopped their work. He began to lean forwards when the sound of a creaking door came from the darkness in front of him, behind Hinata as she sat on the chair.

"_Hyuga-kouhai_," came a mocking tone on wings from the dark, "It looks like your time is up."

Hinata almost groaned when the fox crept away from her, but she kept quiet. Her byakugan was still activated. She could see him--a man wearing a pale color with dirty-blond hair and green eyes. She saw how he reached out and suddenly the veins around her eyes began to recede. He set his palm down on her shoulder and leaned over her, grinning as the power of her heritage was oppressed by his strange powers. Hinata felt the man's breath on the back of her neck, she wondered just where Naruto had gone to now that she couldn't see him with her eyes, but she didn't dare look for fear of giving him away.

"You're very quiet today... but we can fix that." His voice came as a whisper, soft and pleasant in her ear, but she knew that what he had planned was not going to be soft and pleasant. She could smell his musky scent and knew immediately that it was the same smell that plagued some of the men in her squad after they've _had a good day_. Naruto particularly often.

The women that happened to be stationed here at this base were so unlucky, she thought. Who knew a monster like _him_would come out of nowhere, claiming to be Konoha's greatest enemy and laying utter waste to the group of high-level jonin and the handful of ANBU that were stationed here as replacements that day. An attacker couldn't have picked a worse day, and yet he had managed to defeat them all in under an hour. She heard that Ebisu, Naruto's friend's jonin-sensei, was here--and yet she hasn't seen any sign of him yet. Not even a corpse.

"Rakshas," or so he has called himself, "You look well. I suppose you've heard about the intruder," she muttered darkly, nodding her head toward the collapsed doorway in front of them.

"I did. I figured that the rest could handle them, but this odd little creature with a white mask rushed on by them. It's hard for me to believe that he was stopped by something so simple as a collapsing ceiling." He chuckled darkly as he began walking toward the doorway, his hand coming up to cradle his chin as he inspected the trap door. "What a piece of work... he didn't even make it far enough so that I could see a crushed limb."

Fox held onto the ceiling by the handle of a stuck kunai in the wall so as to not give away his position with chakra. He held on firmly and tightened every muscle fiber in his body that he held domain over to keep from falling down on top of them.

"Ha, them? I only said intruder. One intruder." Her breathing grew just slightly shallow.

"Ha, ha, ha. You're right, you did."

Hinata's hearing picked up a faint whirring sound that Fox's hadn't. Her eyes widened and she screamed, "Watch out! Naruto!"

Fox turned his head and heard a buzzing sound as a flying shuriken sawed into his mask for a fraction of a second as he began to lean back. He leaned back just enough so that the windmill shuriken would deflect away properly, and also to avoid having it lodged in his throat as it spun wickedly in the air away from him.

"Almost..." muttered a pair of glowing orange eyes from deep in the darkness beyond where Rakshas entered from.

"What a throw! What a maneuver! I applaud you, boy!" He chuckled, clapping enthusiastically as he laughed with a toothy smile.

The fox landed in a low crouch with two oddly shaped kunai drawn in his raised left hand. He planted his right down in front of him as he leaned forward, looking through the holes of the white mask into Rakshas's green eyes.

He switched up the way that he held his weapons when he heard footsteps. The kunai had a rounded end that was made up of a half circle, with another smaller circle in the center that attached to the long handle, which had a classic pin-hole-esque shape to it.

"Don't clap for that idiot," came a feminine voice from behind Fox, "Just look at him: he's still got his back to me."

Rakshas shrugged with an amused grin plastered on his face. "Maybe he just realizes that I'm the bigger threat of the two of us."

"Really!! Well! I guess I'll have to fix that one. Come here!" Fox leapt out of the way of a windmill shuriken and rolled over several times until he was up against the wall when another came whirling by at a slight angle. He spun his kunai a half circle so that they'd be pointing up his arm toward his shoulder and held them against his side, then he pulled his shoulders inward, tucked his arms in against his abdomen and pressed his chin down against his chest as the windmill skimmed both the wall and the floor that he had snuggled into, barely missing him.

Suprisingly, the shuriken just a kept on flying, and lodged itself into the wall on the other side of the room.

"Holy shit." Rakshas paled.

Hinata laughed, and Rakshas and his partner turned to look at her.

Rakshas smirked, "Know something we don't?"

As Hinata began to speak, Fox turned over and sit the kunai down on the floor as he used his hands to push himself up onto his feet. "His name is Fox. He's the fastest."

"The fastest what?" Rakshas said.

"Nothing. Just the _fastest_."

"Pffbt. Big fucking deal..." The person in the dark with the orange eyes started to search for something on their person.

In an instant, eight dark string-like weapons shot out like thin rods, spearing through the air with a hissing sound accompanying them. Fox hopped upward with arms extended and bent slightly at the elbows. As he fell, he pushed away one spear with his hip as he fell, another was caught in between his heels, one in his hand and another in the nook at his elbow between his biceps and his forearm. They buckled and whipped around in a furry of vibrating hums as they were all deflected away from his body.

The two of them stared on in bewilderment as a blur of a white mask formed a crescent in the dim light as the fox landed on one foot, and then turned to handplant the floor with one hand and used the other together with his legs in an arching motion to catch the rest of the spears. When he settled back into a crouch the wire-thin, chakra-propelled spears fell harmlessly to the floor around him, surrounding him with several buzzing sounds as they vibrated violently from hitting the tiled floor around them.

"That was... fast. I could barely see it." Muttered the voice from the darkness with the orange eyes.

Hinata giggled, which sort of crept the others out. Fox loomed toward Rakshas, with his odd-shaped kunai in either hand, who quickly scurried over to the other side, grinning the whole way. "Alright, alright... you win, mouse-boy. I don't think I've met anyone as quick and as quiet as you. Maybe you're just a very crafty illusion?"

Rakshas's grin faded away together with the rest of his body as he appeared suddenly behind Fox with a knife in his hand. Fox's head shot up in suprise and they both stood still. Hinata, meanwhile, held her breath.

"I... guess you're not."

"Those kunai... they were for you."

"O, I see..."

Hinata's lump in her throat relaxed when she saw that Fox was the victor. His arms were crossed in front of him with a kunai held in either hand, one hooking and deflecting the man's weapon while the other was pressed deeply into his liver. Rakshas took a step back and Fox turned his head. Hinata watched him as his enemy fell to one knee before him, vomiting blood.

Orange eyes flickered in the background as he finally slumped down against the hard floor, a pool of blood forming beside him.

"_No!!!"_ Yelled his companion, who shot out of the obscurity of the darkness and revealed herself. She slashed ferociously at Fox with a long knife that forced him to take several steps back in order to dodge effectively. "_Get away from him, **you bastard!**"_

He dodged his head left and right to dodge her impaling strikes and jumped backward to get away from her downward and upward slashing. He noted, while she was moving, that she was wearing sneakers instead of shinobi sandals. When he was far enough away and she had stopped slashing at him, he stopped moving and just watched.

She kneeled down over the body of her companion, groaning in pain herself as if she was the one who had gotten stabbed.

"Rak! Rak!*" She groaned again, shaking him lightly after turning him on his back, her hand pressed against his wound as she tried in vain to stop the blood.

Fox looked at Hinata, who flinched when she saw him looking at her expectantly.

"What? I couldn't possibly..."

"Hyuga-taichou..."

"Don't think that just because I'm a woman I would feel sympathy, I--"

"I'm not, Hinata." He interjected, "I feel it, not you, but only you can help... I thought you said one man took over this base? Why was she back there, too?"

"I have no idea. I would have called you an idiot for not thinking that maybe she passed by me while I was unconscious, but even when he stopped suppressing my eyes, I only saw him in that room behind us, and there's only a few more left in this base. There's no exit that way."

Fox nodded slowly, wondering what that meant about this woman... what that meant about this man.

"I've never heard... of a bloodline that suppresses other bloodlines... or of one that is unaffected, either."

The woman with orange eyes didn't even look up, she had her face buried in his chest, her lips pressed against his bloody vest. "_Rakshas!_"

_"Kali." _He said. Barely over a whisper.

She shuddered. _"You hear me, Rak?"_

_"Yeah... I hear you, Kalienna. You're so beautiful, you know?"_

_"Shut up... you shouldn't speak."_

_"Your eyes, they're like butterfly's wings."_

She shook her head, chuckling. Tears had settled in her eyes. _"You corny bastard... thank you."_

_"I'm gonna die, babe."_

She sniffed, rubbing her eyes with the back of her forearm, "But I--eek!"

"Outta th' way, little girl."

Kali fell on her rump and sat with her palms pressed down against the ground as she gazed on. She didn't have to ask what was going on, because she saw that surreal chakra that swirled and misted out of Hinata's slender fingers.

Fox stood beside her with a grin on his face; there was still a nasty gash on the front of the mask from the large windmill shuriken that had sawed nearly halfway through it.

Before the orange-eyed girl could ask, Fox spoke up. "I don't know. She usually doesn't listen to me when it comes to this sort of thing."

Kali sighed with relief when the bleeding stopped, but felt a pang in her gut when she saw Hinata's scrunched up expression on her face.

"You'll get wrinkles with a sour look like that, Hyuga-taichou."

She smiled sweetly and tilted her head slightly, lifting up her left hand in front of her and flipping him off.

"What's wrong? Is he going to be alright?"

Hinata stood up and walked over to Kali. She smiled, nodding her head and set a palm down on her shoulder.

"Thank god..."

In less than a bat of her eye, Hinata jabbed two of her fingers into several spots in Kali's abdomen, shoulders and legs, effectively disarming her and immobilizing her.

Kali grunted and her eyes rolled far into the back of her head as she fell pathetically to the floor below. Hinata smiled sweetly when she found that the girl seemed to be unconscious.

_"That was harsh,_" Rakshas hissed.

"I can make it even harsher on her." Hinata offered, reaching into Fox's pouch and fishing a kunai out of it.

He saw the kunai and gulped, shaking his head. "Yo... I didn't say it wasn't warranted." He directed his eyes elsewhere.

Fox chuckled a bit behind his mask and took a few steps forward.

Rakshas looked up and furrowed his brow. They stared at one another for a minute before he finally asked, "What?"

"You're not the one who took over the base, are you?"

Fox grinned even more when Rakshas's eyes widened. Kali let out a very soft groan from her position on the floor.

The brow on Hinata's head rose and she had to swallow to keep from snarling. "What the hell are you saying? That I'm hallucinating?" She snapped, placing her hands on her hips as she walked up to stand beside the fox and glare at him.

He smiled sourly. _Yatta... just a moment ago she was being so sweet. Now she's back in super-hyuga mode... but seriously: there's not enough bodies lying around..._

"No. I'm not saying that, but Rakshas here wasn't the one. He's not strong enough." Fox declared, gazing down on his captured enemy.

Rakshas narrowed his brow and glared at Naruto with dark green eyes. "I _am _the one who took over this pathetic excuse for a forthold. You think I'm weak or something, you animal-less ANBU whore?"

Fox looked at him for a moment with distrustful eyes.

"Fox-kun... let's just go. We can have Beetle-chan carry them."

He shook his head. "There's something wrong with this, Hyuga-taichou."

"We're going. That's an order."

He turned to glare into her eyes. "You don't trust me anymore?"

"_I never have_." She turned her head slowly, biting her lip.

Fox held out his hand and molded chakra in a circular motion at incredible speeds until a great spiraling sphere appeared visible in his hand. Grabbing Kali and throwing her over his left shoulder, he stepped back over to where the slab had fallen. Rakshas watched him carefully as he attempted to stand.

"Wait. I'll help you." Hinata moved quickly to help him onto his feet to lean against her. As soon as he threw his arm around her shoulders, she pressed two points of his tenketsu on either shoulder, effectively rendering his arms useless.

He looked at her with a curious grin on his face.

"I'm sure you understand," she said, "You came in claiming you were going to make me a little less quiet, didn't you? I don't take rape threats lightly."

"Sure, that's fine. Just hang on to my arm. I don't have any feeling in my hands anymore."

"As it should be. I've got you."

When they turned toward Fox and the door, who looked back once past them to gaze into the darkness at the end of the base, leading to a few rooms that they haven't checked, he was holding a giant sphere that was easily half his size. It seemed to spin a little slower than the smaller one had, but that didn't make it look any less threatening.

He shut it off when suddenly the large slab of concrete was being pushed, along with the large chunks of debris on top of it. He stepped to the side as Tortoise and Eagle stepped into the room.

"Taichou!" Eagle exclaimed, happy to see Hinata alive and well.

Tortoise's posture after he moved away from the rubble suddenly straightened up when he noticed Hinata standing there. He turned to look at Fox, who looked back at him.

Their eyes battled silently, but in the end Tortoise turned away to walk over and help pick up Rakshas, much to his dissappointment.

"Hey! I was enjoying myself over here. Hyuga-taichou-chan! Please let me walk with you again!" He whined playfully, at which both the large tortoise and the meek little eagle looked disgusted under their masks. Fox walked out the doorway with Kali on his shoulder.

When he reached the front of the building, Beetle came running up to him, glad to see he was safe. She looked at the large gash torn into his white mask and then tried to find his skin under his uniform to see if he was cut anywhere. "You came back." She whispered through her teeth as she looked up to the eyes of the mask, only to see that his were closed.

He set his hand on her shoulder as he came to a brief stop, then he continued walking. He walked calmly, but was still abnormally swift in his stride. He was heading home in quiet, and entirely unconcerned with how the rest of the team managed to make it back to Konoha.

_The next afternoon..._

When Naruto next woke up, there was a loud banging on his front door. He lived in a small apartment that was as far away from the Hokage's tower as possible. The only apartments out this far were a part of the Hideki apartment complex. He didn't personally know the owner, but he didn't care very much to know him anyways. He may have met him once when he was signing the paperwork in the beginning, but it was a pretty big complex with a nice restaurant on the top floor and a swimming pool in the court yard. He saved up enough money to be at least one or two payments ahead at all times, just in case. There were several people working in the office downstairs, so he couldn't be sure that he had met the owner or not.

The complex was built only very recently, opening up about four months ago. Four months earlier, Naruto was living with Konohamaru in the home that he had inherited, and a year before that he had left his old apartment after nearly fourteen years of residence there. The salary that he used to receive as a ward of the Hokage had stopped coming, but Naruto was already making enough money to support himself comfortably, as well as cover whatever expenses he recurred on some of the longer missions and more elaborate, delicate ones. He remembered having to spend at least a month's pay on a single mission to a city in the north, where he played the role of a young gambler entering a gangster's game. The gangster wasn't important, but there was a Lord that he was there to assassinate. Apparently he pissed off the wrong person--someone with money--and he was to be killed for it. He recalled that he had once accepted a mission to help the same man, together with Yamanaka Ino, get married.

He finished the job with a wire, the fat man was pushed onto his chest on the ground and strangled from above.

It was fairly clean, although there was a little vomit on the floor.

The loud knocking sound didn't cease, so he picked himself up from his bed and glided across his room on his feet to open the door. He slammed a kunai just above his head into the wall so that it stuck there, then he opened it slowly, smiling half-heartedly as he greeted whoever it was that was bothering him this late in the afternoon. "Yes?"

"Fox-san!"

Naruto's eyes quickly adjusted to the bright light of the sun behind the young boys standing at his door. He didn't even need to blink. "Lion-kun. Mouse-kun. Aren't you supposed to be practicing your water-walking exercises?"

Lion and Mouse were scrawngy looking kids with brown hair and blue eyes--Naruto could always tell the difference between Lion and the others because of their posture. Lion was always excited, sort of like he had waited too long to pee and couldn't wait to get whatever it is he's doing over with to run to the restroom. Mouse walked a little more loosely, taking long strides and hopping innocently every now and then. If he was excited though, he was often loud. Lion, on the other hand, liked to grin a lot and insult his other two brothers.

Naruto arched a brow when Mouse waved at him suddenly; he must know the answer to some unasked question.

"Hai-hai! But listen!" Mouse exclaimed with the enthusiasm of a playful pup.

"Yeah, we've got this thing going on over at the orphanage, it's the big-brother, big-sister get-together that we told you about a few weeks ago."

Naruto tried to close the door, but Mouse jammed his foot in just in time.

"Look, guys. I'm not looking for anyone like that..."

"Selfish bastard! We're not doing this for you! Besides, you're our big brother, you ass!" Lion gawked, doing his best fake impression of disgust.

Mouse shook his head to add to the effect.

"Yeah, we'll look like a pack of losers if at least one of us doesn't have someone going with them! It's a big party, and we almost already picked out some of the girls for a dance! One of them is actually going to get adopted soon, and she's got a real hot step-sister that's like four years older than we are!"

Naruto laughed, planting his face into his palm.

"No, _six_ years, dumb ass. She'll be nineteen in December."

"Whatever."

"You have to come. You ain't got a choice now." Lion said, matter-a-factly.

"Please?"

"When is it?" He abandoned his resolve with a smile.

"Yes!" They both yelled, Lion wearing the largest grin out of the two.

"Day after tomorrow. You have to bring a Kimono for after the dance--everyone from the orphanage was given permission to stay up late to attend the festival coming up."

"Oh? There's a festival coming up?"

"Yeah, the festival of the--"

"Wait! Don't say it out loud like that! You have to whisper this kind of thing," the mouse said.

"Fine." The lion replied, loudly. "_It's the festival of the Kyubi no Kitsune."_

"Ah." Naruto said, solemnly.

"Don't worry. We won't tell anybody that he's actually right there--sealed away!"

"Quiet, you moron!" Lion chastised.

"Hey, where's your brother?"

Mouse hadn't noticed that he changed the subject.

"Don't worry! We're not scared that you'll blow up and try and eat us or anything," said the mouse.

"Shut up, damn it! He was asking where Badge is."

Mouse frowned, "O, well... he's working that girl... she said no to him the first time, and every other time after that but he's been trying to impress her since last week."

Naruto raised his brow. Who could this little girl be, unimpressed with one of the three wonder twins? He held out his palm in a 'hault' gesture and turned back into his apartment to get a little better dressed. He walked over to the mirror in his bathroom and leaned over the sink as he turned on the hot water. After splashing his face, brushing his teeth and putting on some deodorant, then walked over to the closet to pick out some clothes.

In the end, he stepped out of the house wearing all orange. His jacket was only faintly trimmed at the collar in pure white, and the cuffs of his pant legs and sleeves were a dull red.

The two triplets looked up at him in awe, each wondering how he could go out in public wearing so much orange, but both unknowingly and simultaneously agreeing that it was definitely him, and he might look strange otherwise.

Naruto followed them close behind, but it wasn't fast enough, and so the brothers dragged him along. All while complaining that he was the fastest in Konoha only when he was being paid to be.

_"... Kali. Are you awake?"_

_"Rakshas... you're alive..!"_

_"Yes, dear."_

_"I-sniff-thought you were going to die. Even though she used her chakra to repair the wound."_

_"I thought I was going to die last night during the interrogation. You have no idea how sadistic this Yamanaka girl is... you should pretend like you're still asleep tonight so that they don't pick you up."_

_"Rakshas?"_

_"Yeah, sweety-pie."_

_"Stop that... how... how did he know?"_

There was silence for a moment as he contemplated it, wondering just what the fox had seen walking in through the door. Whatever it was, that fox was a fast little bastard. He'd have to be quick-witted to out-maneuver the fox. So far Fox already knew about his ability, and--more important--he probably knew about Kali's ability as well. If he didn't, he couldn't risk letting that tidbit of information out. There were no Hyuga in the interrogation unit--probably because the stuck up bastards had their own squad for interrogating suspects in the Hyuga compound--and for some reason Hyuga Hinata had not accompanied Fox and the tortoise-masked ANBU anywhere near the interrogation room. She probably had something to do as the head of her clan, he figured.

_"You heard? Hm... I'm not sure. He somehow knew that I wasn't the one that infiltrated the base in the first place, but I think that he meant something a little deeper when he said that._

_"Do you think he knows about me?" _She whispered, hesitantly.

_"I can't be sure. I'll find out next time I see him, but expect the worse."_

_"Didn't you lose a lot of blood?" _She asked, genuinely worried about him.

_"Only enough where they told me I'd survive. A pink haired woman came in and gave me a quick physical, then bopped me on the forehead and told me I was a 'weak little bastard' for wasting her time. Apparently, Hyuga-kohai has some pretty impressive healing abilities. She didn't just seal the wound, she sped up the healing process in only a few seconds. I feel like I haven't lost any blood at all... just like I got stabbed. It's really weird." _He closed his eyes with a smile on his face and a light chuckle passing his lips. Their stay as prisoners wasn't going to be all fun and games. He'd have to try and figure out a way to sneak out, or at least try and fight his way out.

_"I was awake when he brought me here, into the room. I was worried when they kept you in the other room--I guess that's where you were examined and interrogated? He was very gentle. Very kind."_

_"Good. Means I'll kill him quickly--when the time comes."_

_"Thanks. I'd feel better that way."_

When Naruto stepped into the orphanage, one he only stayed at until he was around eight, he was greeted by sixty or more captivated eyes. If he had just started wearing orange that day, this may have unnerved him--but he had long grown used to the stares that accompanied a type of flamboyancy like his own. He walked forward, head naturally high as he gazed on lazily at the swarm of younger and older children that lived together under this one roof. The color of their eyes ranged from common colors like brown and black, to exotic ones like red and silver.

He walked behind Lion and Mouse, following them past the living quarters into the office and meeting room, slash classroom, where apparently he was going to sign to allow the orphanage to keep track of the visitors during the dance before the festival.

They quickly walked through the doorway, followed calmly behind by Naruto. He saw a few of the staff were there, some of them getting ready to leave for the day, while the head nurse sat at a small desk working on some paper work for a child who was coming in.

"Hey, obaa-chan! This is our big brother, Fo...er, I mean Uzumaki Naruto!"

She looked up and nodded, "I remember you. You used to be here when you were shorter than them."

"Yeah. I've gotten a little taller, but it wasn't until I was around seventeen that I've actually been taller than you."

"Watch it, boy. You know us older folks start to shrink the older we get. We get smaller and smaller until one day we just up and disappear."

Lion gasped, "No you don't! Really? You do?"

Mouse blinked at his brother. He calculated quietly how he would use this moment against him later in an insult to get him back for all of the ones that his brother has said to him.

"Not really, boy. Why don't you all go out and play with the rest of the children? Okami-san has already started the day's arts and crafts."

"Oh! Last time we got to make necklaces and bracelets!" Mouse exclaimed.

"They promised next we'd get to play with clay." Lion remembered, and the two of them ran out the room to search for Okami-san so that they could play too.

"Hey, Uzumaki-kun."

"Yeah, babaa-chan?"

Her face got a little red when he called her that, but she spoke anyways. "Why haven't I seen you around more often, if you're their Brother?"

"Everytime I try to step through the front door they're already waiting for me and pushing me out. I don't think they like it very much here--not that that's any of your fault." He said.

"No, I understand. Or at least, I try to. The boys and girls here don't receive the same type of love and affection that a real mother and father can provide. We try our hardest--everyday--but we know that somehow we're overlooking something. We're always worried that we're ignoring one or more of the children in favor of the others, but it's impossible to care for them all with only a dozen helping hands, at sporadic hours, no less. A child's love is not suited to be clocked in and out. It is spontanieous and wonderful, like them."

"Yeah... granny, I've got to admit: you've got a way with words."

"Oh, son. Thank you."

"You're welcome." Fox started to turn around, but the older lady raised her palm.

"Wait, I need to tell you something."

He turned back to face her, silently.

She narrowed her brows as she diverted her eyes, and he could tell easily that whatever she was thinking about was making her upset.

"I'm sorry." She stood up, then planted her hands down firmly on the hard surface of the desk. "Forgive me," she offered, bowing her head deeply as she struggled to keep herself standing.

"Don't be. I couldn't understand the sort of pressure that you were on to have me removed from the orphanage back then."

"Nonetheless... I am truely, deeply, _sorry_."

"I wouldn't call you 'grandma' if you weren't such a nice lady. I know you felt bad, but thank you for telling me."

"You're something else, you know, boy?"

"Yeah? How's that?" He asked, grinning.

"To take on the responsibility of being a caregiver and role model to one child is admirable in itself, but _three_. You even trained them in being shinobi."

She smiled, but her brow made her look troubled. "They're children, and I hate for them to be in such grave danger whenever they are on duty, but I am older--and I know the age of the children that were being sent into the war in that old ignorant age, with only a knife in their hands and little knowledge of what it was like to be a ninja. Those children love you, and the stories they tell here of you are incredible. Please, never forget about them while you are taking on these missions. Remember them when you face other children out on the battlefield, and when you feel like there's no reason to return. If you ever gave up, ever--I think--so would they. Please, don't ever give up."

Naruto closed the door behind him after saying his goodbyes, then he looked up and began to walk forward only to nearly knock over a young woman wearing a yellow flower in her black hair. She had beautiful brown eyes, and her lips nearly snagged his out of the air as he excused himself and clumsily stepped past her.

"Sorry about that--"

"No, no. No problem at all."

They smiled at eachother, and Naruto slowly walked away, but they only broke eye contact after she walked in to the old lady's office with a younger girl walking in quickly behind her.

He heard a bit of skittering feet as someone approached him from behind, so he turned his head away from the door and saw the third brother, Badger.

He looked back toward the door then shook his head, saying, "Who was that?"

**Author: **I'll be working on the next chapter in a week, or maybe a little earlier if I find myself bored at home next week. I'm practically done with finals, and I'm not taking classes during the summer, so I'll probably be writing up a storm. I hope my little bit of readers who actually read past the first few sentences enjoyed this story! I'd really like your feedback, because then I'll know for sure (from you guys, I already think I am) if I am using too many lead OC's. This story will center around Naruto and Hinata, but it's probably pretty obvious that a stable relationship between those two isn't right around the corner. **Yes**, Hinata is very out of character. It's not for just any reason, but I do feel like she's always used as some dumb little girl who only grows because she's around Naruto. And that works pretty well in some stories, but if you are Naruto-Hina fans, then you probably already know about DameWren's old story and S'tarkan's--which has gotten a little more interesting lately. This story is going to give Hinata her own spot-light, and even though Naruto's pretty strong here, that's not what the story is going to be about.

On a side note, I like the triplets. I was just going to make them all very hyper and answer the same together all of the time when they were out on the mission, but I decided to give them actual 'faces' in the form of the masks and a little bit of a backstory. I'm going to try and flesh them out a little more as the story continues, and you'll be seeing more of that powerhouse jutsu they've got. Anyone got any ideas for a name for them? Let me know.

_Bye._


	4. Chapter 4

Chapter Four

**Disclaimer:** I do not own Naruto.

_Updates:_ Grammar check for this chapter and a little bit of a renovation to the end. The next chapter may come out soon if I don't have much school work this week. Wish me luck.

Summary/Details: Chapter one introduced several original characters. Most of them will be permanent. Chapter two ended the brief look into the training barrack and into some details about Naruto and Hinata's relationship. Chapter three and four are all about the three boys, Lion, Mouse and Badger, and the preparations for the Kyubi festival.

If you have any questions, please message me or review.

* * *

In his room on his bed, with the window behind him and the moon's light coating the night stand in a like a thin plastic Naruto watched as the eerie light reflected off of the mask and a few other things on the furniture. Some of those objects included a small shinobi knife, a sponge, a tube of paint, and a bottle of water.

He never thought he was going to wear a mask in his shinobi career, surprisingly. It never occurred to him that he may want to keep his identity a secret (at least to some extent). Unfortunately, very few people knew how to form a rasengan. Much less a rasengan infused with the wind element that it works so well with. In fact, those who witnessed his attack could probably narrow his identity down to just a few people in the village (and together with his blond hair), even straight down to him.

The mask, however, offered him the invaluable option of withholding most of his signature attacks and using others instead and, therefore, obscures the identity of him and his loved ones.

He never thought he would be wearing a mask. When he's asked why he doesn't have the mask painted to match his codename, he's never had anything to say. Ever since the Rookie Nine's generation came up to the Jonin benchmark, every other ANBU soldier started commissioning an artist in the village to draw the mask for them instead of just using the regular stencils that the older generation had grown accustomed to.

He just left his blank.

By the Hokage's orders, the artist is not allowed to ask questions about the shinobi's identity, and any meeting face-time would be conducted under the shinobi's terms, so long as they are reasonably set to fit the artist's schedule. The shinobi must have the proper seals and 'proofs' with the Hokage's hand-written signatures on them.

All of the shinobi in Bear's squad had commissioned an artist, except for the boys. Lion, Mouse and Badger each finger painted them themselves. Naruto knew; they were done here in his apartment. He still kept other various paint tubes in his dresser drawer. Beetle's mask was quite beautiful, actually. After seeing it, Naruto had no doubt in his mind that she had a taste in either drawing or painting herself, and perhaps shared some of her ideas with the artist who finalized her visions.

Tortoise made no mention of who painted the mask. He said quite bluntly that it was not important what his codename was or whether or not he had a say in the design of the paint on his face. The animal was not chosen by the shinobi after all, it was the Hokage who would have to be able to distinguish between all of the different ANBU personnel, and quite often he would ask them to make changes to the patterns on their masks so that he could more easily distinguish one from another.

As for the rest: Eagle paid someone in his family to do it for him, while Bear painted hers herself.

It took their captain a little under two hours to get it exactly how she wanted it.

They spent hours beforehand coming up with different ideas, using different materials, paints and creams and brushes.

They spent a long time here in his apartment, and also in one of the living rooms built into the Hyuga compound.

His chest bothered him when he remembered. With his commenting and her flawless artistic talent, he watched as her lovely hand and the paint brush, held like the stem of a flower in her delicate touch, quickly brought the mask to life. She would often look up while he watched, periodically looking into his eyes for his approval.

What could he say? Why have artists pour so much love and soul into something that will just get blood all over it? That talent and the time it took seemed like such a terrible thing to waste, but Naruto bit his tongue the entire time, watching hopelessly as she turned the lovely white mask into something much more than any canvas and a few dabs of paint.

He was clearly surprised, when the mask that she showed him had the snout of an animal that he had never seen. The vivid blues of the sky and purple strokes of silk-colored lavender painted the image of a bear; which, the only real recollection he had of 'bears' were the teddy bears in gift shops and convenient stores for last-minute buyers on girl's birthdays.

_They_ were round and pudgy. _This_ was not.

What he thought he saw, at first, was a ghost, perhaps a spirit. Its face was sleek and slender at the snout, but had a very wide curve for the cheeks that reminded him, due to his predicament at the time, of a woman's hips. The brows were slender as well. Slight, actually. The nose was small, almost cute, but not quite. And the eyes, the most predominant feature because of the negative technique she used, were white like Hyuga eyes. So white, one would light aflame just by being caught in its gaze.

Painting ANBU masks became an art form that night.

Naruto took a breath and then stood up from his bed after painting his mask once again. The cut just above the eyes from the weapon that hit it was hard to cover up, but he managed fairly well with a little bit of clay from the ground outside and some glue. With some sand paper, he'd patch it all up later and it would look a little better after some more paint. He apparently failed to realize the hypocrisy in the feelings that he had between designing one's own symbol for the ANBU animal and keeping his mask clean and white.

After setting the mask down, he flicked on the light at his night stand and looked at the clock. It was three in the morning. The moon was probably already fading again, because it was getting darker. He moved to the other side of the room by a wooden chair, and then sat down on his knees with his back facing it. Taking a breath, he placed his palms down on the floor and started to walk himself forward as he set his toes up on the chair, straightened his back and pumped out the first pushup.

It was time to wake up anyways. He had plenty of stuff to do today, so he'd just have to do his morning workout a little earlier.

After the standard body weight resistance exercises, he stood up to leave the apartment. Locking the door behind him, he stepped out into the cool morning air in Konoha and started running. Often times he'd meet Lee out here for a quick run, but today he planned on avoiding him if he could. Working out with Rock Lee was like trying to swim up a waterfall. Naruto was pretty sure he could eventually do that with chakra though, so he wasn't even sure if that would be an adequate metaphor since he felt that he would never be able to keep up physically with the 'beautiful green beast' or whatever he called himself.

An hour and a half later, at about four thirty, Naruto made it through the main road outside of the Hokage's office and was now moving away from the monument toward Central, a long, wide stretch of road that cut diagonally and curved around again until it broke up into seven separate roads that went everywhere from the training grounds to a pair of hot springs and what is left of the Forest of Death. And really, Konoha was conceptually built much like a spider web, or (more likely) like a ball-shaped crack in a window pane; all roads came from one point, although some wrapped around that point. The Hokage's tower was the point at which the brunt of the force from the thrown ball was centered, while the mountain behind it was the wood paneling to the window.

Jogging swiftly though Central and cutting down the sub market district where Ichiraku was, Naruto could see further down the way that preparations for the Kyubi festival were already underway. He didn't realize how much preparation went into festivals like these; he had never gone, at least not to one in Konoha.

The Kyubi, though it was sealed away into Naruto's belly still preyed on people's minds to this day. The veterans of that war, a war lasting a hundred years in a single night, against the most terrible force to ever have hit Konoha in their lifetimes.

Fight after fight after fight, and Naruto was still no where closer to changing people's perspectives. They called him a hero for a day when he defeated Pein. Perhaps that lasted a few months, Naruto didn't know. After spending some time trying to find the eight-tails, and then training in a strange room where he contained the power of the Kyubi, there was a skirmish outside of Hidden Grass and the Hokage called to him for help. He spent an entire year there, wasting away his childhood for a small fight that escalated into an insidious war. Thankfully, the war was shorter than others had been. It's been four months since returning home then, two months since the defense against the enchanted samurai, and two days since taking back the training base at the outskirts of the village's territory.

How old is he now? Eighteen? No, nineteen today.

Today is his birthday, and even though he has been busy, he never forgot it**.**

After a good morning run and another stop at his apartment to get some breakfast and a change of clothes, he made his way through the gardens where parties after the ceremonies would be held.

It was only seven thirty, but people were already hustling about, preparing for the evening's events with a prayer to ask for Kami-sama's blessings on their festivities. Naruto stood in the background, watching as no less than forty people gathered underneath an ancient tree that had managed to survive Pein's terrible attack several years ago. There were several rumors surrounding that tree. Some say that there are spiritual powers protecting it, while others claim that a shinobi gave his life to nullify the blast that swept through the entire village in order to protect that tree. There were a few places similar to the tree around Konoha. Some so close to the vanishing point, that point which people claimed Pein's attack first spread from, that it was most certainly supernatural that these things survived.

One of those was a body of water, a lovely koi pond that had a legend tacked onto it years before Naruto was even born. It was a man-made pond that used to belong to a young widow who lost her husband to the Third Great Shinobi War. Naruto didn't know much else than that. The woman's rickety old house was blasted down by the attack, but apparently she had left or passed recently. The pond was still there, and there are still koi fish in that pond.

One place, however, was not so lucky.

That headstone that had the names of all of the great and selfless shinobi that died protecting their family, friends and their village in battle was gone. There wasn't even a small shard of it left. Just the empty ground that now sits in its place. Naruto was certain that the explosion is not what caused it to vanish. The cause was perhaps some sort of vandalism, although he didn't know a soul who could actually lift that heavy rock... perhaps the Raikage could, even with just one arm left.

It was one of the reasons why Naruto hadn't seen Kakashi in a long time. The man withdrew and Naruto could only guess that it had to do with the disappearance of the stone. Perhaps he feared the inevitable: that he may one day forget that friend from so long ago.

Naruto sometimes forgot about Iruka, even though he was still alive. Their relationship had soured because of various misunderstandings and Naruto now rarely made an effort to go and see his once favorite sensei.

That was the whole story, though. Naruto just wasn't maintaining the relationships with his most precious people like he used to. Instead, most of his effort went into those three boys and his captain.

"Hyuuga-taichou," he'd say, "Come, train with me."

_"There is no need to train with one another anymore." She'd say. "We know each other, in and out."_

She may as well have torn his heart out through his throat.

_"It's pointless."_

Naruto grumbled as he waited for the front door to the orphanage to open up. He'd promised the boys that they'd get some new hair-cuts and sandals for their feet so that they looked good for their dates with some of the other girls at the orphanage. He also said they would go eat lunch together afterward. He wasn't sure why he did it. It was probably Iruka rubbing off on him, and since Konohamaru had grown up so fast, reaching jonin at his young age with great control over the rasengan, he wasn't around for him and Naruto to hang out anymore.

Suddenly, the door burst open and slammed Naruto in the face, right on the nose. He took a step back and groaned in pain, his eyes looking inside and his brows furrowed as a clear sign of agitation on his face.

"Hiya, Naruto-san! Let's move, let's move, let's move!" yelled Mouse, waving his arm frantically as he ran past his surrogate-father. Right behind him was Lion, who was quick to turn Naruto around while Badger slammed the door behind him as he ran hoping to get away from the terror inside.

Naruto tilted his head to the side and barely captured a glimpse of the old lady running outside covered in paint, glitter and uncooked macaroni. She picked up a potted plant from outside and hurled it at the boys, yelling that she would devour them and grind their bones to make her bread and other nonsense. Bleeding from his nose, Naruto could care less. He tilted his head back as they dragged him away, a groan escaping his lips as he felt a harsh headache burn the sides of his head.

* * *

"So you _killed_ them." A clan elder for the Hyuga muttered. Lying before him and, Danzo's only son, Iejuzo, the new head ANBU's 'Ne', or root, were the bodies of two ninja with cloud headbands.

"You can see that quite clearly for yourself without having to ask me." Hinata said, indifferently in her soft voice.

"The rules in any village state that on shinobi's property, an intruder forfeits his life to the will and the strength of the owner. To break in so carelessly into the Hyuga's main branch and try and assassinate the clan head. I do not pity them." Iejuzo muttered bluntly. There was a look on his face of curiosity as his eyes roamed the corpses on the lovely hand-made rug that was covered in blood and vomit. "Though… I am curious: just what does that lovely fist do to draw so much blood without any physical trauma?" Iejuzo looked up from the body to gaze into Hinata's eyes. "The gentle fist usually doesn't produce these results."

Hinata was wearing her less formal, five layer kimono, which for a non-Hyuga could probably pass off as a wedding kimono. She stepped over to a large oak desk and her fingers hovered over a grouping of scrolls on the table until she pulled one up that required her attention as the head of the clan. She took her seat for a moment while the elder stepped in beside her to lay out her brush and ink on her left side.

"Kumaro," she began as he twisted the cap off of the ink bottle and pushed it forward ever so slightly, "has Neji returned yet from his mission to Otogakure no Sato?"

"Erm... Iie. Unfortunately, he and his former sensei are still out of the village. There has been no word from him since then."

Hinata nodded, not even looking up as her elder spoke to her. Iejuzo couldn't help but wonder, just what was going on inside of that mysterious mind.

Seeing that Iejuzo's inquiry was left unanswered, the elder spoke with determination in his voice as to his opinion on the matter, "This is the _second time_ that the Lightning country has dared to attack the Hyuga, and the second time that Hyuga-dono's life has been at jeopardy. In her own home, no less! There is no forgiving this... we must not let this end lightly."

"I do not care." Hinata said, scowling. "Contact the Hokage. Send the bodies back to Kumo with no message. That's message enough."

Much to the elder's disdain, Ne's leader quickly spoke up with a grin on his face."That is a brilliant idea, Hyuga-sama. Quite daring, really! However!" Iejuzo had a little too much emotion written on his face to be related to Danzo. There was a conniving grin that spread onto his lips as he thought of the possibilities for the two bodies before them. "We should send the man with 'no animal'."

"Why should we send him, rather than one of our own?" The elder asked, brows furrowed with a look of distrust on his face. Quite honestly, Iejuzo was not 'one of their own'.

"Why would we send anyone in the first place," Kumaro added once more with a scowl.

"Because he is competent. I trust him with any order that is given to him, and not only does he perform his duties to the 'T', he also has the reputation as one who goes beyond what is necessary for the success of the mission. He would not only deliver the bodies, but perhaps we could convince him to also steal away a calf or so, so that we may nourish and use it to our advantage. Imagine having one of their kekkai genkai: here, in Konoha? Amazing possibilities... and you, Hyuga-sama," he said enthusiastically while turning to look back at the beautiful clan leader; "would be the only-"

"You are overstepping your bounds, Iejuzo." The old man said correctly. "You are only welcome here for business concerning Hyuga-dono's position as an ANBU captain. But otherwise, you hold no authority or power."

Iejuzo's smile never left his face. It unnerved the elder to a great extent.

"Are you proposing to tell Hyuga-dono what missions she, as the head of our clan, should sponsor before the Hokage and the council? And _how_ the mission should be carried out?" the elder said before his master, obviously driven by unchecked emotion; "_Who_ do you think you _are_?"

"I am merely a messenger," he claimed, bowing his head just slightly; "You claim that I am trying to influence the leader of your clan. Well… quite honestly, _I am_. Hyuga-sama, for the well-being and the prosperity of the village I would gladly give an arm, an eye or a tongue, but for you I would lay down my life. I would not propose anything at all that would come to harm you or taint your reputation or your clan's."

Hinata, seemingly unaware of the conversation before her, continued making revisions to certain documents and signing and dating others. She slowly ripped some of those apart and set them in the tray of a small metal device sitting on her desk and lit them on fire by turning it on. Once the fire was lit the documents in the tray were disposed of, she stood back up and turned to walk away from her desk while Kumaro moved to put away the ink, brush and leftover documents on top of her desk into another tray in a neat fashion, and shut off the device.

"As I was saying," he tried again, "Hyuga-sama: you would be the only one who received credit for the abduction. It would be a great deed for the village."

"Enough." Hinata's chakra always filled the Hyuga mansion as a warning to all intruders, but right now it seemed to completely vanish, which made both Iejuzo and the elder flinch. "You say that you would not propose anything that would tarnish my reputation or my clan's reputation, but what you are implying is that I should risk casting Konoha into war with Kumo to try and abduct a child with one of their blood limits. You are asking me to stomp on their feet because they pulled on my hair."

"On the contrary, I am telling you that you could chop off their thumbs because they pulled a strand out." He said, in a corrective tone. Suddenly his presence became overbearing to Kumaro, and the elder took a step back from him as he eyed the younger man curiously.

Hinata pulled back one of the sliding paper doors and stepped outside into the garden.

Iejuzo was absolutely stunned, for Hinata was brilliant and magnificient; a goddess among women, a star among floating debris in space. He looked at her longingly. He let his eyes roam her body. Even from afar he felt like he could just barely reach out and touch. She made the idea of being the kimono that she wore exhilarating. He wished that for just a second he could be the perfume inside of the jar that she sprayed onto her body every day, then he would be spread all over her while he slowly seeped into her skin. He did all he could to keep from biting his lip as he waited for her to remember that they were there... no! Only him, waiting on her, when suddenly she spoke out.

"I grow tired. You may leave." And with that, he was forgotten. He was angry. No, he was furious. He let the smallest frown corrupt the ends of his mouth, but he muttered a 'hai' and stepped away, heading for the front door of the complex. The elder had not missed the longing look or the disappointment and the fury afterward.

In silence, the Elder began to close the sliding door shut, when she said, "Have Hanabi come see me after she has completed her training together with her friend."

"Of course, Hyuga-dono." He said, bowing his head to her even though her back was turned. He was going to shut the door again when she spoke once more.

"Also, please fetch me Uzumaki-san by two pm... I have ANBU matters to discuss with him."

"Yes, Hyuga-dono."

Hinata looked up from the center of the large garden in the center of the Hyuga, main branch estate.

In her mind floated the images of eyes the stark shade of blue that was sometimes visible in stones of particular amber.

It was lovely.

The sun was bright, the wind was cool.

* * *

While sitting in a salon waiting for the boys' haircuts, Naruto was busy being teased and hit on by a hair stylist with a box of tissue in her lap.

"You didn't get this walking into something, did you?" She asked with a hint of playfulness in her voice as she dabbed at his nose.

He gave her a look, but slowly shook his head. "I got this because something walked into _me_."

She laughed, shaking her head. "You're so funny, Naruto-kun."

"He's also single!" The mouse said aloud.

Naruto flinched when he heard it and in doing so caused more pain as she was the one holding onto his nose to try and stop the bleeding. Though she was directly beside him, he dared not look in the eyes of the hungry predator whose body was coiled up, ready to pounce on him at any moment.

"_I _just so happen to know a single girl who's looking for a good time." She said slyly.

Hesitantly, Naruto let out a slight chuckle, "Really?" His tone of voice made it sound like he didn't believe her.

She grinned cutely, but Naruto was not caught unawares. That grin was still predatory and he was certain that behind those pretty lips were long, venomous fangs that ached to sink into his throat.

"How about taking her to the Kyubi festival tonight? I'm sure she'd be _delighted_."

_This girl is crazy... she's talking about herself like she isn't even here._

"Uh, I'm sorry, but I wasn't planning on taking a date tonight. I think you're real cute, but I just wanted to spend my time at the games with the boys." He nodded to the triplets who had mixed expressions with the same chubby cheeks.

"Oh, don't be silly! I already have a boyfriend that I really like, but Nobume over there has been looking for a..." she leaned in to whisper this part, "big, strong man to…_you know_."

Naruto barely looked up to the girl she was pointing to when he noticed that they were a bright yellow, or perhaps gold. Their eyes met and locked.

Lion looked up curiously to the girl who still had a grip on his hair, though she seemed to have forgotten that he was there.

_That's the same girl who..._

Their pupils flirted with one another and for a brief second they shared a thought.

_... I saw when I was visiting at the orphanage._

They gulped, both thinking of their encounter at the orphanage before Nobume realized what the other girl was probably relaying to the blond.

"Aii! Don't be telling people stuff like that! Thanks to you, I have a ton of weird people coming in and constantly asking me out. It's embarrassing in front of all of the customers!"

"Psh! Like you don't like the extra attention." The hair stylist said, then she shrugged and leaned in again to whisper into Naruto's ear. "Just lay her already. She _needs_ it."

Nobume huffed and threw her scissors and comb at the floor, leaving a lion waiting in his seat with a jagged mane around his head as she stomped out of the shop through the back door. Naruto sat in his chair oblivious to the tiny trickling of blood that painted his upper lip as he mauled over what to do next. He didn't feel quite right being the cause of the girl's embarrassment, although one could say that this other girl was pretty rude and terribly frank about her friend's sex life, so maybe he had no fault in the event. In their chairs the boys were looking at him expectantly. Their eyes were widened just slightly, pupils dilated, and they were already studying his reaction to the situation and taking notes. In their heads, they are forming complex thoughts and assumptions about their surrogate father's interactions with women and how he dealt with uncomfortable circumstances. They didn't even really care about their hair cuts. They probably wouldn't until they were older.

He sighed, steeling himself as he stood up onto his feet. He swore that the boys were cheering him on with their eyes. His actions today would curve their actions in the future, and he had to be a good role model if he expected them to treat women with kindness and respect like Tsunade often reminded him during many of her drunken stupors.

He turned to look at the hair-stylist and shook his head. "Ma'am, I don't think it is right to make assumptions for anyone else. And I don't just mean assumptions about me or people you don't know. I wonder what interest is it of yours what someone else does with their time or of their love life?"

The girl frowned, but she had a brow raised.

"Now... she, Nobume, was cutting my little brother's hair. I assume you'll step in her place to take care of _that_?" He then turned to look at the mangy looking, chopped up top on the young boy's head. He always did have a ton of hair. His codename as 'lion' was not random, although he was often called 'little-lion' around the ANBU barracks and mission briefing rooms, and Tsunade always went out of the way to call him 'Shishi-chan'.

"Sure, whatever you say. I'll take care of his hair." She stood up with a lazy sigh and pretended to sulk over to the little-lion. She kicked aside the other girl's comb and scissors that were on the floor and pulled some other ones out of the drawer. Naruto followed her and quickly gave some instructions on how he wanted the boy's hair to be cut, much to the lion's dismay. They had a brief discussion until Naruto looked at him through the mirror and for a moment the boy shut up, then quickly muttered a 'whatever' and 'fine' as he waited for the woman to butcher his long locks.

Naruto, idly watching as the odd hairdresser took care of the boy's hair, he turned to look at the other boys and wondered why the other two ladies in the room were so quiet. He looked back toward the door that led outside and saw that it was cracked open. He walked toward the door and, on the way, picked up the scissors and comb and set them down on the edge of the sink just next to the door as he passed through it.

Each of the hairdressers gave one another a look while they were cutting hair and all three of them flinched when they realized they made a mistake on all three boys at the same time. "Er... young-man, how would you like a shaved head?"

Outside, Naruto saw that Nobume was not immediately visable. He looked around once while he kept his hand in between the door and the frame so that he could go back inside.

He had no idea why he was doing this; he may have had some sort of odd moment or _spark_ with that girl while at the orphanage and again here in the salon, but he was still having his own dilemma with his captain. What did _she _really mean to him? Why did Hinata push him away all of the time?

Just as he pushed the door to go back inside, he heard a sigh. Just beyond a trashcan outside, he was able to see the toes of her tennis shoes. She slowly shifted her legs back and forth, apparently trying to get comfortable. Maybe she was waiting for them to leave? He stroked his chin and just looked at the toes of her shoes for a while, considering what he could do. He wasn't exactly the most talkative person, not anymore anyways, nor could he easily or eloquently articulate himself and his feelings; there was evidence enough of that in his relationship with Hinata. So he didn't know what to do about this girl and, oddly enough, his infatuation of her.

He eventually walked toward her, then past her, and came to rest his back up against the wall beside her. "I have friends just like her, you know."

She laughed. It was a sweet but guarded laugh. She began wiping her eyes. "Really?"

" 'fraid so. One of them tells me it's troublesome for him to see me without a woman; says that I should suffer just as much as he does." As he said this he remembered Shikamaru and his blonde girlfriend.

Again, she laughed. This time with a long sigh at the end.

"Illa is always complaining that she doesn't like seeing me alone. I tell her that I don't want to look for anyone right now and that I'm happy just being together with my little sister..." He barely saw the small contemplative gesture as she thought momentarily about what she was about to say, "My family's finally going to adopt her. I've been going to see her for the past two years now. I'm so..."

"Happy?" He offered.

She nodded, "... and relieved."

"Oh?"

"I didn't think they understood just how serious I was about how much I love this girl. She is truly my little sister, and I cherish her with all my heart. She's such a sweet girl. I know she'll become whatever she wants to be as she grows older."

"She's a very lucky child to have someone who's kind and devoted to her the way you are."

Nobume's eyebrows raised and she stroked at her dark skin with her manicured, but unpainted fingernails. Even with the darker tone of her skin, he was able to tell that she was blushing, but the aversion of her eyes from his made it even easier to make it out. "That's nice of you to say..."

"I mean it."

Her hand slowly moved up from her arm and she clutched her shoulder. "You believe everything I said about her was true?"

Naruto was silent for a moment and nodded. "You may have me fooled but... I think that you sound and look very sincere."

She looked up at him and saw he had a foxy grin on his face as he gazed at the Hokage monument from where they were with his eyes squinted nearly shut. "From one older sibling to another," he said, "It's hard not to get attached, isn't it?" He thought of the three boys, all of their differences and their potential. He knew they would surpass him one day. He just had to make certain that they were still alive for that day to pass, and then he could stop working and retire to a life of fishing and smoking from a pipe.

She smiled, Naruto's grin deepened, and then she nodded.

When they walked back into the salon together, they stopped and Naruto's jaw dropped while Nobume covered her lips with her fingertips. Two of the boys were mumbling that they didn't like waiting so long, while Lion was standing directly in front of him, poking him in the chest as he growled. "You left us alone and look what they did to my hair!"

"What... hair?" Naruto muttered, his mouth hanging back agape.

"That'll be 1,200 Ryu*, tips included of course!"

Naruto blinked and absentmindedly reached for his wallet. Then he realized something, "Is that a Mohawk?" He cried out, pointing at Badger.

They all looked at Badger, who seemed to be cool and indifferent to their long stares. "I think it adds character." One of the hairdressers offered.

"It actually looks pretty wicked," Nobume piped in, grinning with her tongue stuck out just a bit.

Naruto looked exasperated and slowly shook his head. "Yeah, I guess it's cool. I always wanted to get one myself, actually, but... that lady's gonna kill me."

Much to Naruto's displeasure, Nobume nodded slowly. So now he was sure of it!

Mouse suddenly squeaked, the only one left with a normal short cut. His arms were waiving frantically in the air, "Oh, miss! Where's that girl that you visit at the orphanage? Badge here has been trying to ask her out for the festival for weeks now!"

"Mouse!" Badge's cool demeanor faltered when he heard that.

Nobume giggled and nodded, "Actually, that's good." Now shaking her head with an expression on her face that made it look like whatever she was thinking about was pretty funny. When she finally spoke again, she started by looking at each of the kids briefly, but ultimately her vibrant, golden eyes fell in line with Naruto's long gaze. "She's said that above anything else, what she wants to become most is a bona-fide kunoichi. I think that she would really take a liking to you if you actually told her that you are a shinobi."

Naruto blinked as he set the money down on the counter and eyed Badger curiously. "You didn't tell her that you are part of er... well, I guess that makes sense, but you could say that you are a Chuunin. That's pretty impressive by itself for your age."

Badger kept quiet and nodded slowly.

"Are we going now or what?" Mouse complained.

"Aww, don't you like being here with us?" Illa purred as she bent over and pinched his cheek until he squeaked 'ah!'

"I do!" Lion grinned, eyeing her cleavage. Naruto swiftly bopped him on the top of the head and pointed at the door.

"_Sorry_," he said, embarrassed.

"Move it."

Used to following his commands, all three boys walked over to the door, but two of them didn't try and hide that they were sulking.

Naruto waved good bye to the others, then turned to look at Nobume. She smiled shyly at him, which he thought was cute.

"Come with us to the festival tonight?" Naruto offered.

"S-sure." She said, barely above a whisper.

"Great. For tonight, I think we should go just as friends. Maybe after, we might change our minds then, hm?" He asked, giving her the space that she wanted when she said that she didn't want to start dating immediately just because her friend had singled her out. "I'm sure the boys can't wait to meet your sister. They'll have their own play-dates for the evening too, good friends I guess from the orphanage."

"Oi! They're _not_ play-dates! They're our girlfriends for the night."

All of the adults shared a laugh.

Nobume grinned nodded enthusiastically, saying; "I can't wait."

They worked out the details of where they would meet up and at what time, and for a while Naruto tried to push Hinata into the back of his mind. He walked out with a happy grin as he walked a few feet behind the boys, watching them as they jumped back and forth, waving their arms and yelling as they tried to re-enact some of the missions that they had been on, or talked about what they were going to tell the girls while at the festival. It was funny. He remembered when he was that age that he acted the same way. He was much louder though, and he wore bright orange and played pranks and tried to get everyone's attention all of the time that he became known as a nuisance rather than just what he was: a kid. He walked with them into a summer kimono shop, which was bustling with activity due to the festival. There were people of all sorts, colors and words that walked through. He noticed a couple that seemed to be from one of the other continents, due to the odd clothing that they wore as they shopped for something for the festival. There were several people all over Konoha today, their hitai-ate's worn in various fashions on their person and their kunai pouches missing. As an active ANBU shinobi, he was always on duty. If anything suspicious came up, he was to drop what he was doing and investigate it immediately. Just knowing that made him tense. It was tense to have all of these guests for only today.

He sat on a chair while he watched the boys run through ailes, searching for a 'manly' kimono. Naruto couldn't help but smile when Lion explained that they were looking so hard because they wanted to look great. He didn't even have to teach them anything sometimes, the three of them were adults in children's bodies, and often they made the right decisions. Only once in a while does he have to intervene to let them know that their actions are unacceptable or that they could have done things a better way.

Badger was already wearing a black kimono with an ogre picture motif pattern. Mouse wore a dark blue kimono with a blue leaf pattern that was only a shade or two lighter, giving it an interesting look. The white sash complimented it well.

Lion couldn't decide on his, so Naruto stood up and took one that the young man hadn't noticed. It was a brown one with a tan sash and a darker coat. Lion looked up at him and Naruto smiled. "Try this one on."

Naruto started walking around, looking for one for himself, although he already had one at home. It took an hour to get all three boys fitted, paid for and bagged, and Naruto decided to just go with what he had at home. While he waited, he had some sandals custom made for him on the spot by a happy old man who offered him a puff from his tobacco pipe. The kids were looking at him, and he thought that he should probably give them a few more lessons in the art of subtlety, so he knew that he would have to turn the old man down.

"No, thank you sir."

"Your loss, young man." He grinned, shrinking his beard up against his chin.

Naruto nodded and waited patiently while the man measured his feet and got to work, sanding down blocks of wood that were sawn only large enough to fit certain foot sizes. He had several other scraps stacked in the back of his shop, and faced the Kimono shop that was across from them. The three boys eyed the sandals with surprise and curiosity. The first thing that caught their attention was that the sandals were wooden, but very smooth. The old man used different methods of refining the wood to make sure that it was as comfortable as possible for the wearer, and his experience showed in the mastery he had over his trade.

The thong was added to the end product after the teeth were put in and the first sandal was assembled. Naruto waited patiently for the second while he inspected the first that he had in his hands. He then handed it over to the boys so that they could look over it.

"Wow! This would be so awesome!"

Naruto laughed. "Don't even think about it. That old lady would cut my throat if I gave you guys these things and you ran around the wooden floors in the orphanage, going 'clack-clack-clack' all day."

Mouse chuckled, but Lion scowled. "That lady always ruins everything."

Naruto, and even the old man, laughed.

"Actually, son, if you are looking for children's feet wear, you can head around the block and there is a beautiful woman there who sells various goods from other countries. They're fairly priced, and most of the wear is formal if you're interested.

"Thanks, I'll remember that. How much do I owe you?" He had spent quite a bit today, but he did say that he would get them sandals as well. He may as well splurge a bit and get them something nice that they can wear with other things than simply a kimono.

9999999999999999999

The three of them left the market district with smiles and waves to the old man with their kimonos wrapped up in neatly-folded bundles in bags that Naruto carried while he allowed the three boys to try walking on his new sandals for a while. He chuckled when he realized that they were scared they were going to fall even though the pair was made well and spaced out enough so they would be fairly easy to walk around in.

They stopped by the woman's shop and found that she sold wares far more diverse than just foreign footwear. She was apparently an import trader who brought in many oddities of the rest of the world and fetched a price for them here in Konoha. The woman was older than any of the boys had expected, and Mouse was the first to question the old man's tastes.

"I thought that he said that she was beautiful?" He asked, looking up at Naruto with a confused look on his face.

Naruto nodded slowly, trying to word what he was going to say correctly, "Beauty is often wildly unsimilar amongst different people. What I mean is, what may be 'beautiful' or attractive to you may not be the least bit attractive to someone else. In the old man's case, it was the other way around for him."

The three boys gladly tried on different shoes by then, and when they paid and left, they were admiring them as they walked.

"Look at the color of mine! They're blue!"

"Awesome, but look! The toe on mine is pointy and curled! Ha ha!"

"I can't wait to wear them tonight!"

When Naruto dropped them off at the orphanage again, he told them to prepare themselves while he took their bank notes to go withdraw a sum of money that he had them write down then and there, although the boys would have trusted him anyways to only withdraw enough for the festival and nothing extra for himself.

He walked back home, thinking about the festival, the boys and that girl Nobume. She was pretty, sure. He wondered what it was that interested him about her. Perhaps it was just infatuation, or lust. She was certainly exotic. Not many women in Konoha had skin tone as deep as hers. He walked over to his closet and opened the door to take out the large kimono hanging in the center on a separate rack from the rest of his clothing that was hung out in front, back to back.

He told the boys he would be back in two hours. He had plenty of time, so he decided to shower before he put on his kimono and new geta.

After the shower, he stood in front of the mirror and took a good look at himself. In his eyes, he wondered where he could find that fire again. That flame that he lost long ago when he was younger and dumber and less powerful. What had snuffed out those embers that kept it lit? Were they truly gone?

99999999999999999999

**Author's note: **I've made changes since September 1, 2010. Thank you for reading, and please review if you like my story :)


	5. Chapter 5

_"Is all that we see or seem _

_But a dream within a dream?" - Edgar Allen Poe_

After Danzo's death, Shimura Iejuzo, his son, inherited a generation of hate and distrust that he barely deserved. But instead of trying to clean up the tarnished reputation that his surname pinned to him, he blatantly ignored it and set out quickly to make his own name, beyond that of his father's.

Before his father's death, he had grown quickly as a shinobi reaching Genin and then Chuunin by the end of age ten due to his father's intensive training regimen. By thirteen, he was Jonin. On his fourteenth birthday, he was given his first solo A rank mission to be a representative of the leaf village while visiting the village hidden in the clouds.

It was actually an under-the-table SS-rank mission. The mission was ranked so because of the conflicts that it could stir between the two villages. If he was caught, he would be considered a missing nin and therefore the Hokage and Konoha would not be responsible for his actions, though they would pay the bounty that they would eventually post on their bingo book.

It was a terribly dangerous mission for a squad and for a single shinobi it seemed impossible. There were no promises or assurances that he would make it back home alive. His own father, in fact, told him that he would die an honorable death for the sake of the village if he completed the mission before he would ultimately be struck down. If he died before removing the current lightning daimyo, however, he would die in shame and it would haunt their blood line for as long as his actions were remembered.

Shimura Iejuzo, all fourteen years and 120 pounds of him (roughly 54.5 kg), stood before the Hokage who gave him the austere impression that what he was about to say would not only be difficult to take in, it was practically a synonym for the word "death".

The professor, as he was called by many of the shinobi in the village, was not one to make such impressions lightly. He cared very much for his village and for every shinobi and civillian just as well. He believed that everyone in the village was akin to his children, and like a father he would protect his children with everything he could, but the paradox was that he sometimes had to send off some of his children to do the work for him. How was he supposed to send his friend and rival's own son into a mission that the village probably didn't even need to take part of in the first place? He believed there were always ways around violence and bloodshed. It was that same notion that made him look weak in the eyes of most of his enemies (the ones who never fought him) and even some of his allies.

Iejuzo, trapped in the somber mood of the Hokage, stood at attention before the shinobi god just the way that he was taught to ever since he was a young boy. The Hokage eyed him quietly for a moment, nicking the smooth wood of his tobacco pipe against the surface of his hard desk. He usually asked Iejuzo to have a seat.

Today he didn't.

"When I was your age, I spent most of my time chasing after this one girl... she's now my wife... and we spent hours each day together, and on the days that our duties separated us we wrote letters and sent them out by carrier hawks. I still have each of those letters..."

"Hokage-sama. Please excuse my curtness. Why tell me all of this?"

"Shouldn't_ you_?" The Hokage asked in a nonchalant tone.

Iejuzo looked unsure of what the Hokage was asking because of the way he looked at the pipe he was handling as if it were the only thing of interest at all in the room. "Shouldn't I _what_?"

"Shouldn't you be chasing girls and maybe writing some letters?" The wise monkey said.

"I am shinobi. To be a proper shinobi I must follow rules. I must kill my emotions _and_ my desires for the greater good of the village."

Sarutobi took a puff from his pipe as his eyes shifted slightly to look out of the large window behind his office. The look that the young man had given him looked a lot like Orochimaru's looks recently. His young student had grown into a dangerous, powerful man who seemed to be interested in the oddest of things. Just a few days ago he asked if he could go on a mission to Kusagakure to barter with some of the merchants there on a representative visit. The Hokage had to deny his request because Orochimaru could not give him a good enough reason to risk his life in a village full of ninja who loathed Konoha. Sarutobi breathed the tobacco in and out of his lungs and watched the smoke drift through the room and dance off of the glass.

_Shimura Iejuzo. Shimura Danzo's son... Danzo, you fool. You'll throw away your only boy like this? I would... could never do this to either of mine._

The Hokage looked at his young shinobi with dark hair and even darker eyes that reminded him of the old war-bird. "You look just like your father."

Iejuzo was silent, and Sarutobi Hiruzen took it that he wasn't completely fond of his father. He didn't have to wonder why, seeing as he was now being put into this dangerous predicament because of him.

He really did look like him though. There was the beginning of that hard chin that his dad had, and the skin tone was exactly the same. He was probably a bit shorter than his dad was at his age, but Sarutobi had no doubt that the boy would end up looking more like his father. Sarutobi kept his thoughts to himself though... right now wasn't the best time to look back on his younger days and the rivalry that he used to have with the boy's father. This moment was all about the mission.

Iejuzo was to assassinate the Lightning Daimyo in the middle of the capital, while in the Raikage's presence; on his own.

The lightning country's daimyo was known to have many shinobi body guards and adept in a few shinobi skills himself. His guard included two A-ranked shinobi in Konoha's bingo book, one a former Konoha nin, both who were known to be particularly ruthless.

"Sometimes you have to make your own rules, Shimura-kun." The Hokage said, before nodding. "You may leave. Good luck with your mission."

Shimura Iejuzo bowed deeply and then headed out the door whence he came. When he went back to his room in the Ne training facilities, he looked into the mirror in his small bathroom. He prepared for the mission that night and left the following morning. The lightning daimyo was visiting the village hidden in the clouds to speak with the Raikage and enjoy good company together with his family.

_A shinobi must always put the mission first. Rule number four._

Iejuzo's hands wrapped around the head of a young chuunin out patrolling the border of Kumo and with a sharp twist the young man fell to the ground silently. He made his way into the village wearing their own clothes and weapons, leaving all but senbon needles back at Konoha. He pulled the headband that he wore completely over his head off and tightened the red cloth around his head underneath the hitai'ate from Kumo.

The bleached hair he now sported gave him a more authentic Kumo look, since it seemed to be a trend around here. In his first few minutes entering the village and stopping by a small diner to purchase a meal, he was stopped by a 'fellow' kunoichi who showed some interest in him and they began flirting. After about thirty minutes, the two decided to attend a festival that was occurring at the time where they enjoyed an extravagant play that depicted the Shodai blasting the leaders from all of the other villages with lightning bolts and clapping his hands to produce thunder and shatter their eardrums.

Iejuzo made his way to the woman's apartment and tasted sake on her breath as they crashed through the front door. He found out much about the girl, including that she would be present at the Raikage's and Daimyo's meal to watch out for suspicious activity. She also found out that the girl was responsible for coming up with the watch's routes for the night. She had already presented it to the Raikage, but there should still be a rough draft somewhere in her apartment, Iejuzo rationalized. While their bodies were entwined and her head was tilted back and eyes screwed shut as she let out throaty, gutteral moans, Iejuzo noted that her invitation to the meeting was sitting on her tall dresser, right in front of her t.v.

_A shinobi must never show tears. Rule number twenty-five._

Iejuzo pushed a senbon needle up against the throat of the Kumo kunoichi who was crying pitifully with eyes red and tears already gleaming off of her cheeks when she realized that the man who she fell asleep next to was going to kill her. Her screams ended when the senbon was pushed straight through behind her jaw and up into her throat. As she died slowly and her voice left her, the only thing that she could do while being tied down to the bed was stare into his deep, black eyes. He stared back, and quietly they shared that moment as she passed on.

Using her shower and putting his clothes back on, he moved on with the generic invitation in hand.

His sight-seeing didn't stop there. He spent some time praising the land for its ingenious construction up on top of the mountain. Surprisingly, it hadn't taken long for him to get used to the altitude, but it was probably because of his training. He couldn't be sure. Maybe it didn't affect everyone the same way, or maybe he would feel it once he went back to Konoha.

Kumogakure no sato was built high on top of the clouds, with a mountain, called Spring Mountain, and a jagged pass in between it holding the village up on its shoulders, and was built by the Shodai Raikage. The details had been blown out of proportion-most of the villagers would claim that the Shodai used a powerful bolt of lightning to cleave the mountain in two. More still think that during the First Great Shinobi War the heads of several of the clans from all around the continent battled on top of it for supremacy and the man who would become the first Raikage came out on top.

Iejuzo looked up at the mountain that looked like it really had been cut in two with a knife and he wondered quietly if it really wasn't true.

_A shinobi must see underneath the underneath. Rule number three._

Iejuzo spoke once with the leaf traitor, who was passing by while accompanying the Daimyo, and asked him if he would ever want to join the cloud ranks.

The man laughed, blue eyes twinkling in the sun, and gloated, "Only if it pays better than this!"

Not only had he managed to kill his target only a week later, he made it look like the deed was done by the leaf traitor, leaving only the Daimyo himself to blame for hiring the missing nin. Iejuzo was nowhere to be found with his bleached hair. He left the village and made his way to a small town where he had his hair cut and colored black once more. When he returned, he found that the leaf traitor had been imprisoned in hidden cloud, while his younger A-ranked lightning country counterpart, who barely made it out of the village alive, snuck up on Iejuzo before leaving to kill him. He was given an invitation to see the Hokage so long as he volunteered to finish off the Konoha missing nin. When Iejuzo asked him for proof later on that night, the man held up a light blue eye and a grin on his face.

He was then promptly invited into Konoha to join ANBU's 'root' by the Hokage himself. Iejuzo enjoyed a fine feast and wonderful entertainment in the Raikage's presence the next day as the Konoha representative while the Kumo nin waited enthusiastically for Iejuzo to stride out confidently down the path that lead down from the top of the mountain toward the borders of the village. He wore his Konoha headband with pride while the man-hunt for a kumo nin with bleached hair went underway.

_As powerful as the lightning country is_, Iejuzo thought, _their ninja are totally incompetent._

Although his mission was considered an SS-ranked secret for fear of retaliation or warfare between the two countries, Iejuzo was promoted to Jonin a few missions afterwards for "outstanding growth and progress". His ceremony was small. His father and his one teammate, who has now passed on, was the only audience for his 'knighting' experience. He spent the next six years of his life working his father's spynet outside of the village. It was often said that Danzo had no son, for only a few people claimed to have every seen or known him, and even fewer had ever _actually _seen him. It wasn't until his father died that he was seen constantly throughout the village. A few random shinobi would keep track of him, thinking he was a foreign ninja in a disguise. They'd eventually find that he was holding meetings with the Hokage and the council and was the newly appointed 'Ne' commander. What he found out, once he was given the title of "commander" which his father had long before him, was that there was an even deeper root in 'ne'...

* * *

Iejuzo ducked his head under a collapsing door frame on the south end of an abandoned building near some apartments. He swept his arm outward and his cloak fluttered gently behind him as he reached for a tiny pellet that he pinched in between his thumb and index finger before rolling it forward into the darkness. The small bead popped like children's fireworks poppers and a light flickered and sliced through the darkness.

"You took a little longer today." Said the silhouette of a man who stood in front of the light that shined behind him. The silhouette's head was daunting and excessively large while his body seemed to be covered in something, because Iejuzo couldn't make out the 'figure' of the man who stood before him. There was a gentle rattling like dried beans in a wooden bowl, although the silhouette was not moving.

Iejuzo grinned slyly and shook his head. "No, I think that you are just getting more and more impatient in your old age."

"You could say that the breadth of my patience is inversely proportional to the accumulation of my experiences."

"Pfft. Sure. Still think you're just getting ancient and maybe a little lonely. You could retire and pass down the mask to me... you know, there's a nice retirement home on the upper west side just underneath the Hokage's chin and only one block away from a bingo lounge." He said, grinning toothily.

"Enough. There's a certain clause to passing down the mask... I'm sure you can guess what it is? Now, your report?" The silhouette never moved; the light behind him had started to dull, but the rattling sound never stopped.

Iejuzo's shoulders tilted slightly as he looked through a small nook where he could see the moon. The Hyuga compound was in that direction. "She'll do as I instructed her to. She's not bad at playing hard to get, though." Iejuzo laughed.

The flickering shadow of a figure slowly leaned forward; obviously, convincing the Hyuga clan head to do anything she didn't want to do was nothing short of a miracle. "So she has contacted our little white fox?"

"She's petting his coat as we speak."

* * *

Only an hour had passed. He could already hear music starting up as the main band playing for the festival started warming up. There were sounds coming from some people running down the street with great enthusiasm in their voices. Although they were probably well away from his apartment and outside on the first floor, if he focused just a tiny bit he could hear what they were saying. His eyes closed and he listened.

_"I heard that they are going to put on a jonin-level demonstration of ninjutsu and taijutsu!"_

_"That's awesome, but it would be even cooler if we got to see the Hokage use her ninjutsu!"_

_"Hah! Yeah!"_

Naruto stood at the door just as their voices faded away. He quickly checked to make sure that he had his wallet (and the withdrawal and deposit slips that the banks took from shinobi in the village), a tanto concealed in his robes, and a disposable camera that he bought a little while ago before the mission to the outpost, before he stepped into his geta (wooden sandals with teeth) and exited his apartment. As he turned toward the closed door to lock it, he heard the slight sounds of steps on the shingles way up high above his head on the fifth floor. He was on the second. He slowly reached into his kimono, surprised he would need this so quickly, and turned his head slightly just as three shinobi with pale white eyes landed behind him. Not quite intimidated by the three Hyuga 'elite', he allowed himself to relax his posture and looked on lazily as the Hyuga in the middle stepped forward to speak.

"Uzumaki-san. Hyuga-dono has requested an audience with you."

Naruto looked un-phased. "I see." He pulled out the key to his apartment and turned around to lock his door.

_She sent a three-man squad out here to get me? I wonder if that means I don't have a choice? _

They watched him and loosened up a bit when they realized that he wasn't going to put up a fight like they had expected him to (he had a small smile on his face that made them a little shaky). They waited patiently for him to put away his camera and his wallet into the folds of his many-layered kimono before they turned and walked. Every step Naruto took could be heard due to the loud clacking of the geta (wooden sandals with teeth underneath) on the pavement and cobblestones.

Two of the Hyuga elite flanked his sides while the third was walking directly in front of him, leading the way. Naruto's eyes shifted back and forth under a heavy brow as he looked around at his surroundings. Even though he didn't see another Hyuga, he knew that they had at least one more watching him from far away with the Byakugan. Some of the best could keep an eye on him from a little under a mile away. He kept quiet as they walked and quietly wondered what she wanted to see him about. He still had to go deposit the boys' notes at the bank and withdraw from his own account before he'd go see the kids back at the orphanage.

And then there was Nobume, that girl from hidden cloud.

He frowned. He was really looking forward to going out tonight. Whatever it was that "Hinata-sama" wanted better be good, especially after that last mission. The way she was acting lately-namely, after the attack to Konoha by the enchanted armor that they barely fought back-was really throwing him in for a loop. He couldn't understand it. He tried flirting with her a lot to ease the mood, then joked around with her, acted serious with her, kept silent around her; nothing was working.

Now, she seemed to think that she owned him-sending three or maybe four Hyuga elite, you could tell by the blue sash that was tied around their waists and the very long sleeves they wore with their usual white clothing.

"So are you guys going to the festival?"

One of the other two men, the youngest looking with wide eyes who he hadn't spoken to, answered him. "Hai, Uzumaki-senpai. Hinata-dono has given us permission to attend as shinobi on call. She will be performing there as well, I believe."

Naruto blinked. "Will she? That is unexpected. Is she one of the jonin who will be showing off some ninjutsu or taijutsu?"

"Correct, Uzumaki-senpai."

Naruto nodded. Not too many people would be able to comprehend just what Hinata would be doing with her chakra, but he knew that whatever it was, if she aimed it at someone, it was deadly.

Her performance would probably look more like a dance than anything else.

When Naruto and the group arrived at the compound, they stopped and waited at the gate and allowed him to walk the grounds freely. When he stood in front of the building with traditional paper covered walls and wooden framed doors, he noticed her figure walking amongst the silhouettes of objects within the room. She was moving about the room, back and forth, and Naruto watched it like he would watch a play or a dance. He stared on quietly for a moment before he finally worked up the nerve to step up to the door. Where most people would kneel down before the door and gently knock to ask for entry, Naruto simply pulled the door back and stepped into the room.

"N-N-Naruto!" Hinata blurted, shocked that he would just walk in on her like that.

Naruto blinked, surprised at a couple of things. The first was the most obvious to him: she was wearing nothing but a pair of pinkish white panties. The second? Well...

"Hina-erm, Hyuga-taichou? Did you just stutter?" He asked, fear obvious in his eyes. Was something wrong with her? It had been so long since he heard that timid voice!

Hinata was blushing, and the two of them stared at each other quietly for a while before Naruto started laughing.

"Find something amusing, _Naruto-kun_?" Hinata hissed, crossing her arms over her breasts in embarrassment.

"No, just that this is the first time seeing you naked and even though you've become miss captain Hinata-dono, you're still just as timid as ever!"

Hinata gave him an insincere scowl, her eyebrows raised just slightly over narrowed eyes. "Well, I didn't think you would be this easy to get a hold of, so I decided to go ahead and prepare for the festival. I need to be there by three thirty today."

"Huh. It's already two thirty, at least. You going to be ready to strut your stuff?"

"Sure. I'm only going to show a few of my B-ranked ninjutsu and one A-rank one. Most of the B-ranked ones are real flashy, so I think they'll like them." Hinata said. He noticed that her eyes were always playing with him, always glancing and then darting away and slowly coming back.

"I really like your kimono, Naruto. Where did you get it?" She asked, meekly.

Ignoring her question, he stepped forward and Hinata flinched. When his eyes snared hers and his hands were starting to come up from his sides, her heart suddenly came to life and shook off the frost that was starting to accumulate there over the past year. "What?"

"Nothing... are you ok, Hyuga-taichou?" Her heart beat faster as he came closer.

"Yes." She whispered, breathlessly as he stepped forward again.

They were close. He was gazing down into her soft, white eyes like cold egg whites poured and stirred into cream. She tilted her head back and was looking up into his eyes as if she were looking up toward the sun from underneath the surface of the ocean.

His hands reached up and took hold of her neck. Her breath hitched and suddenly she began to panic. Her head was being pulled in and her eyebrows were quivering as fear overtook her.

Suddenly, she blurted out, "Naruto! I-need-you-to-deliver-some-bodies-to-Kumo-for-me..._"_

Their moment deflated, Naruto let go and took a step back. He couldn't decide... did he want to wait for the bipolar Hinata to control her mood swings or would she go to the exotic girl from Kumo?

Kumo?

"What do you mean you 'need me to deliver some bodies to Kumo'?" He asked, his eyes narrowing as the mood grew more serious and less lustful.

"I mean... two Kumo shinobi broke in today and tried to assassinate me. It isn't the first time that they've attacked me, but it has been a while since they have. I am going to make it a formal mission with the Hokage. You can even pick up your mission briefing at her office."

"Can't you find anyone else? If it's just delivering some bodies..." Naruto began, unsure if he was interested in the fact that there were people stupid enough to break into the Hyuga compound to try and kill Hyuga Hinata.

"I am requesting you personally. No one else will receive this mission."

Naruto frowned. "I won't do it," he said, stubbornly, "And it's not because of anything in particular, but I am enjoying my time off right now. I only get my birthday and a few days after the festival."

"You haven't even asked when the mission is supposed to take place." She pointed out.

"It doesn't matter. I am not interested. If that's all you wanted, you didn't have to force me to come here. A message on a note would've been better, unless you wanted me to see you _like this_." He said, slightly disgusted that he had been brought all of the way here just for this crap. He waited for some kind of reply, but got none, so he shook his head and turned around to leave.

Hinata bit her lip, trying to say what she wanted to say. It didn't come out the way she wanted it to. "Wait... Naruto, I... need your help. It has to do with the face..."

Naruto stopped at the door and placed his hand up onto the wooden frame. He thought about it for a moment and, without turning around, said slowly, "I won't do it until next wednesday. You can meet me _personally_ if you really need my help then."

She smiled softly and called out hopefully, "See you at the festival?"

Hinata didn't know how to explain to Naruto that what she was doing was not any choice of hers. What she was forced to do for ANBU's 'Ne', even though she wasn't a part of that division of ANBU, was forcing away all of her friends. Kiba already didn't want to have anything to do for her after she sent her sister off on a suicide mission that gave their forces a very slight advantage in a mission a few months ago. He felt that her life was wasted needlessly for the cause, and that struck him more than his sister actually passing on. That had caused Kiba to ask for a transfer to another squad, which lead to Turtoise being adopted in from the mercenary units. Shino felt that her status as clan head had changed her personality and her morals. The only one left was Naruto, and the only reason why that was seemed to be because he was stuck with her as her subordinate in ANBU.

Naruto closed the door behind him and left the Hyuga compound and a very hurt clan head.

Hinata's hands clenched and she turned around, looking toward the kimono that she was going to wear for the festival.

_Rule number twenty-five, Hinata. Rule number twenty-five. _She said to herself in her head over and over again as she tried not to cry.

* * *

**Author: **Things are getting real hectic here, guys and gals. I wish I could update a lot more, but it just isn't happening with two online classes and my statistics class over here. I probably should've been studying today instead of writing this, but oh well. I'll be graduating this year and then I'll only have to worry about finding a job with my new degree, so, wish me luck!

If there are any questions, I'll update this chapter and post the answers to them there or send you a message to your review. Thank you very much for reading!

**mini-update: **Fixed a small error regarding Iejuzo's double identity as a kumo shinobi and as a Konoha representative. Wonder if any of you noticed that?


	6. Chapter 6

_"Absence diminishes mediocre passions and increases great ones, as _

_the wind extinguishes candles __and fans fires."_ - **_Francois de la Rochefoucauld_**

"Naruto!" exclaimed the young Mouse as he saw his older brother walking down from in front of the sun up on a hill. Lion and Badger looked up suddenly and started running toward him. All three of them stopped in their tracks to look at him in wonder as he approached them. They had seen him in his kimono once before, but something about him looked entirely different now.

Badger's eyes narrowed slightly as he took in the form of his stand-in sensei: over his bright orange kimono was a magnificient haori that was patterned with the shapes of flying birds. The birds themselves were not detailed, in fact, they were silhouettes of reds, oranges, yellows and white. The pattern spoke so brightly that it was obviously made to attract attention. Uzumaki Naruto was famous for his various attention-grabbing techniques.

Naruto grinned, tilting his head slightly and speaking with an easy, laid-back tone. "You guys gonna get ready or what? Where are those girls you said were going to the festival with us?"

"Oh, they're already over there with another small group that went earlier. I guess they wanted to eat breakfast and play in the morning games." Mouse said.

"Alright. Go get ready, then." He said and the boys walked back into the orphanage.

At about three fifteen pm, the trio was ready for the festival and stepped out the front door of the orphanage wearing the kimonos that they were fitted for earlier today.

Naruto laughed and the boys all looked at him with glaring eyes.

"What's so funny?" Lion demanded.

"Who knew the baba could put kimonos on so well! I thought we would have to wait two hours to get you guys put into those things. You guys are going to strike those little ladies of yours dead at first glance."

He crouched down just as much as his kimono allowed and reached into the folds of the upper body portion of the kimono to retrieve a small disposable camera. "Alright, hang on a second guys. We've got to take a picture or two, so get together by the wall right next to the door there." He waved them back and forth as he needed to and then told them to smile and took one picture, then he told them to make faces and laughed as he took the second picture. Afterward he showed them the magnificient Jiraiya's "Ero-sennin" dance and told them to take the pose at the end of it where they stood on one leg and held one palm out and the other back like a sumo off balance. Taking one last picture of the three stumbling against one another, he turned to start walking with a large grin on his face.

"C'mon. I've got your spending money here. We still need to meet up with the girls and then make it in time to see Hyuga-taichou's performance!"

The three of them looked surprised. "Hyuga-taichou is the jonin performance?"

They looked at one another and then Lion suddenly shouted, "Awesome!"

Naruto grinned. They were lucky that they were able to pick odd-looking kimonos that didn't look totally crazy on them... well, Lion's hair made his more masculine-looking dress look kind of funny though.

Lion was dressed in an aburn fall kimono with rounded sleeves and billowy pants that were tied at his ankles. It had a striped pattern halfway, while the obi that he wore was a little larger and thicker than most men's kimonos have. Like Naruto, he had chosen red sandals (although these were not geta) for the festival. "I want cotton candy!"

Lion was the one wearing a mohawk.

Mouse grinned and his nose twitched a bit as he leaned in close. He was wearing a green and blue kimono with curled shoes instead of sandals. His sash was stark white compared to the rest of his clothing, but it seemed to work well for him. "Now, now. We don't want Shi-Shi-chan to spoil his appetite for dinner later!"

Lion's eyes widened slightly in an ominous guesture as he seemed to be glaring at his brother. "Lions eat mice, y'know."

"And mice take thorns out of lions' paws and make them their friends." He said, grinning. Lion made a face, but then grinned too.

Badger had chosen bright blue shoes and socks and an even brighter shade of blue for his kimono. He wore a thin, dark blue obi that tied the fabrics _and_ the colors in well, with only a small crest on the back with a swirl on it. It astounded Naruto that the boy had picked out the one type of kimono that had the whirlpool country's friendship symbol on it. It was the symbol of Naruto's own ancestors.

The small group head out quickly to where he and Nobume had decided to meet. It was quick, but they decided on just meeting near the sakura blossom trees. Badger pointed out that it was probably not very romantic to meet by a bunch of trees that wouldn't bloom until the following April or so, when it was barely October now. Naruto chuckled and nodded slowly, agreeing. It wasn't romantic to take someone to a place that reminded you of an old crush either, but Naruto didn't care. Sakura was more like a sister anyways. Maybe he could find her and get her to watch over the kids while he enjoyed the festival with Nobume.

Maybe he could just use kage bunshin. The boys would never know... unless they elbowed the clone or something.

They arrived at around 3:45 pm, and since Hinata was supposed to be there fifteen minutes earlier to prepare for the show, he was pretty sure that they hadn't missed anything.

The festival was always lively and even this early in the day there was a rush of life as civilians and ninja of all sorts stopped by to enjoy the festival by themselves or with friends, their family or their lovers. As the boys tried to rush him to move ahead, he went ahead and did his searching for the girls. He vaguely remembered Nobume's sister, whose skin tone was fair and had a tinge of natural blush to it, but with Nobume's platinum blonde highlights in her black hair and her dark complexion fairly common in Kumo, where she used to live as a civilian with her parents before they decided to move to Konoha, he should be able to spot her right away.

"Naruto-san!" came a voice from behind him.

He turned around and spotted the girl, but his eyes widened slightly. The last thing that he noticed was her hair. The first was the fact that she looked stunning in a pink flower themed kimono that looked like the green vines of the flowers were wrapping around her body as the kimono was tucked away. She got her hair cut and Lion seemed to be looking at her with hearts set in his eyes.

Badger's mouth was opened wide and Mouse chuckled, "And you said the Sakura blossoms wouldn't bloom today..."

Naruto was still sort of stuck on the way her golden eyes looked like they were the sun that made the flowers on her kimono glow... and other corny things like that.

"How cool!" Lion blurted out, surprised and suddenly head-over-heels for the girl now that she had a smilar hair-cut to his own. In his head, Nobume cut her hair that way to make him feel better about his accidental hair-do.

When she finally stood in front of them, Naruto gave his best smile and said, "He's right, that looks awesome!"

She smiled back and nodded, "Thank you guys! The girls tried their hardest to get the blonde highlights in my hair just right. My hair's always so curly though, it took forever to make it straight like this!"

"I can imagine. I liked the curls too, but you look great with this... is it a mohawk?" He asked, noticing that there was still hair on the sides unlike Lion, whose hair had been buzz-cut almost all of the way down on his sides.

"Yeah, a faux-hawk." She grinned at the lingo. "See how the hair on the sides of the mohawk is still there and only the middle part of the 'hawk is sticking up? It's one of my favorite looks."

"I'm gonna let my hair do that!" Lion exclaimed, grinning widely.

Naruto laughed and Nobume smiled. He pressed his palm gently against the small of her back and they walked together as the boys started moving toward the games. "Wait guys, remember we still need to meet up with the other girls. Plus, the presentation is going to start soon."

"They're with another volunteer. They were part of the group I was planning on bringing to the festival anyways. A lot of them really wanted to see Hyuga-sama's presentation today."

Naruto nodded, "Ah, that's good then. Where are they?"

Nobume looked around briefly as they continued walking, then she smiled and pointed meekly. "Right over there, see the lady with the really big hair?"

He saw a woman with glasses and really large, fuzzy-looking hair leading the rest of the children to their seats. "Yup. Alright guys, looks like they're getting ready to sit in front of the stage. Why don't you guys go join them?"

The four of the kids walked away, with Nobume's younger sister asking Badger, "So you really are a shinobi? A chunin? Really?" as they moved along to meet the other two young girls and sit next to the volunteer that came with Nobume earlier.

Naruto chuckled, "So you told her about him, huh?" He asked, glancing at Nobume. "How sweet of you to break the ice like that for him."

"He probably never would've said anything. Isn't he pretty quiet compared to his other brothers?" She commented with a gentle smile.

Naruto nodded slowly. "He acts a little older also.. I'm not sure why out of the three that he's always in a somber mood, but I guess it's just his personality... it's more likely that he's not taking to the shinobi lifestyle as well as his brothers are."

"Probably. Are they your disciples?"

Naruto shook his head. "Not officially, but I guess I spend enough time with them for them to look like they are. They made chunin before meeting me, though. I guess we sort of bonded when I found out that they were still living in the orphanage."

The couple walked off together to stand near the back behind the rows of stone seats that were set before a large stage about two meters tall.

"You never met your parents, then?" Nobume asked awkwardly, her gaze averting away from his.

"I think maybe in a dream once or twice," he laughed, "but no, I've never met them in person before."

"In a dream?" She asked, puzzled. How could he have met his parents in a dream?

Making a face, Naruto slowly looked away, muttering '_that's not the sorta thing you tell a pretty girl, Naruto-sama.'_

"Naruto-san. What do you mean 'in a dream'?" She asked again, pushing the subject.

"It's not too interesting... stuff about chakra and chakra sealing, you know." He said, smiling.

"No, not at all!" She said, tugging on the elegant sleeve of his kimono. He really did have fine taste, at least in choosing the type of material, if not the color. It was hard to say that she didn't like the expressiveness that came off of the kimono he wore; the bright colors seemed to suit him and his yellow blond hair just fine.

"Hm," he pressed his thumb underneath his chin and looked at her curiously. "Well, if you're really interested, I think it had to do with some kind of chakra sealing technique that my father used on me when I was a baby. He was able to seal some of his memories, personality and chakra into me, and some of my mother's along with his. I had a very realistic dream because of it that could probably be a really late-acting genjutsu or something."

Nobume still looked unsure. "Isn't a genjutsu some kind of illusion that you ninja make using chakra?"

"That's a perfect description of it, actually." He said approvingly.

"So your father was that powerful, huh? Wow..." she muttered, silently wishing she hadn't brought up a potentially tough subject for the man, "I'm sorry for your loss... or well... I'm sorry. I don't think that that technique your father used could've been a normal genjutsu, though!"

Naruto entertained that thought, idly tossing aside the thought that she couldn't possibly know too much about genjutsu to provide an adequate explanation for her observation, "Really? Why's that?"

"Because I'm sure they told you something that only your parents could tell you from deep within their hearts, and no illusion no matter how powerful can replace true love like that." She said with stunning confidence in her words. "I bet you actually met your parents that day, Naruto-san!"

He was at a loss for words. He tried to come up with something to say, but in the end he could only smile. It grew on him, little by little, and in the end he felt like he was smiling with his whole body. A boulder may as well have been lifted off of his shoulders after that and he started to forget for just a little while that he was shinobi.

Nobume noted the body language and gave him her own, toothy smile as she gazed up into his eyes.

_"Ladies and Gentlemen and little ones! Welcome to the twentieth Kyubi festival!" _The host spoke loudly over the crowd as they started playing some background music. Naruto and Nobume moved forward to take a seat behind their younger siblings, grinning to one another at the conversations that the group was having as the announcer began speaking. _"So your 'big-brother' is really an elite shinobi?", "He-he, yeah...", "I wish I could go to the academy!"_

"_Welcome back everyone, and for those of you just arriving, welcome once more to enjoy the spectacular events at our twentieth Kyubi festival! We expect there to be a large turnout by eight p.m. tonight for the fireworks display, theatrical productions and boat racing, dragon dancing and origami folding lessons, so make sure you eat and drink plenty and enjoy yourselves! First, we will have a display of one of Konoha's finest shinobi's techniques for those ninja enthusiasts out there! Everyone should look forward to this young woman, she really is a glowing star among diamonds here in the leaf; our very own, the once heir and now head of Konoha's Hyuga clan, Hyuga Hinata-dono!"_

When Hinata stepped out onto the stage, several people stopped talking to watch. Most people who dealt with the Hyuga and had met Hinata when she was younger generally could not recognize her as that tiny, mute girl who played with her fingers when she got nervous. Hyuga Hinata, on the surface, had changed so drastically that even her friends hardly recognized her. Naruto knew, also, that her old teammates no longer associated with her because of personal reasons. Apparently Shino felt that she had insulted his family, and from what she told him Naruto still wasn't sure what had been said. Kiba's sister died a few months ago due to a bad decision on Hinata's part in expecting too much of the girl. Naruto hoped it was only that she had miscalculated, but sometimes he wondered; Hana's death looked like it was expected to happen from an outside perspective, and Naruto, again, not knowing the details of the mission because of his absence at the time, hoped that Hinata really wasn't the one to blame for the young woman's death that came far too soon. She was to be wed only three weeks later to an Akimichi who was, for a long time, her boyfriend and lover.

"Who's that girl?" Nobume asked, her jaw dropped ever so slightly.

"Hyuga Hinata. She's the current head of the Hyuga clan and a respected member on the Village-Shinobi Council."

"She's... beautiful." She said, still gawking. And she most definitely was. Hyuga Hinata was an envy of the gods. No real mortals were like her. She had dark hair that shimmered like blue amber in the sunlight and lightning silver under any tone of moonlight. Her lips soft; the clouds became as they are by imitating the feel of that soft portal to her voice, another angelic talent. Her voice could kill men and embolden them to face unbeatable odds, yet she could coo and even the mocking birds couldn't imitate her. Her skin was a soft, supple fabric woven of silver chain and rosy-pink pearls. The crook of her neck was where every man wanted to curl up to and die; the toes of her feet and the fingers of her hands were always soft and delicate even though she had used those very same hands to steal the breath of countless assassination targets. If pleasure was pain and pain were pleasure, agony would overcome you at the barest of touches of her thighs and pleasure like no other would burn you like silk dangling over a candlestick when she bites your flesh. Her breasts, her bosom, her bounty, her love and her heart; her chest was her skin of pearls and silver polished and orgasmic to the eyes like an explosion of many suns in the sky.

Then, he looked her in the eye. The eyes were knives, drenched in poisons, each one sharpened until the blade of the knife was not unlike a single strand of hair, stretched out from the hilt. Her eyes gave away the pain of guilt that she harbored; her misery, her sorrow, it was all there like a cracked mirror. Her resolve broken down into despair while her vindictive glance remained. The walls that once were too high now had no end in sight to them. One could only turn his head up and hope to catch a glimpse of the end of the new walls that she had erected. Walls that were put into place even before her father was killed.

Even Nobume, he had to admit, paled in comparison to the white eyed girl.

Naruto nodded slowly, his eyes staring on callously as he remembered the conversation he had with her. "The girl inherited that slender, soft Hyuga look, minus the terrible attitude... although lately she's been kind of pissy."

Nobume looked at him, surprised at the tone of voice and the slanderous word he used to describe her attitude. "You know her personally?"

"She's the captain of my team."

Nobume's eyes widened. _So he sees her every time they go out on missions together? _"Together with the boys?"

Naruto nodded.

"Wow. So, since the Hyuga clan head is your leader, then you guys must be really powerful."

Naruto nodded slowly. "We are a great team together, but sometimes we all bump heads a little more than I would like."

"Ah." A characteristically 'ninja' answer. Nobume smiled, but it was quickly phased out when she turned to look and saw that Hinata was gazing in their direction as she knelt down on the floor of the stage. Nobume gulped, affected slightly by the look and the feel of the strange, creeping chakra that passed over her a second later.

Suddenly, ninja stars whirled wire around her in intricate loops that totally bound her limbs apart from one another. She felt needles pressing against her throat and saw Hinata standing before her with a scorpion in her hand, which she held by its stinger. She suddenly felt compelled to open her mouth seemingly by Hinata's sheer sense of will. Nobume almost cried out as the scorpion's tiny legs began touching her lips just as Hinata brought it up to her mouth. Then, blue flames engulfed them for a fraction of a second and just as suddenly as the vision came, it was gone.

The blue flames, the scorpion, the wire and Hinata; it had all vanished, right before her eyes and her ears and her skin. She could almost still feel the touch of the scorpion's legs on her mouth.

She turned to look at Naruto and was surprised to see that he was looking nonchalant, as if he didn't just feel that terrible, scary wave pass over them.

'_That sort of power you don't feel everyday...' _

"Did you feel that?" She asked as she turned her head toward him, shook up slightly.

"Feel what?" Naruto said curiously.

She shook her head and looked back at Hinata. _Is she... looking at us? At **me**?_

Nobume shook her head slightly. Whatever had just happened, it was now over. What really crept her out was that Naruto had not even felt that monstrosity of a killing intent. She didn't know there was a ninja that could target his killer intent without allowing others to feel it.

"So, have the two of you... You and Hinata-san, I mean, have you ever..."

She watched as he slowly turned his head to look at her, terror written all over him. The look on Naruto's face made her laugh almost, although she was still too scared that she would hurt her stomach if she laughed with all of the rocks that Hinata had put in her stomach with that look and killing intent.

"What are you asking me? If we've ever... eh... done it?"

She laughed, stomach be damned.

"Ha ha ha! No, no... well, that too, I guess... Mmm. I bet she looks yummy without her clothes on..." Nobume mused while Naruto's loose feeling pants suddenly felt snug and his face twisted into a dreamy look.

_Don't say, 'Yeah, she does.' Don't say, 'Yeah, she does.'_ He told himself, over and over again. "Well, no, we've never gone out."

After saying that, he realized his mistake by the slightly surprised and suggestive look on her face. "_Really? _So you... _have_ done it... maybe out in the field?" She asked, eyebrows raising suggestively. "What's it like?"

"Ah! No! No-no-no! Never done _that_ either!"

Nobume cracked up laughing at the wide eyes on his face and shook her head. "I was just asking. You don't have to be so defensive, _Naruto-san_."

_He may be ninja, but he's still just a gaki at heart, huh? _She grinned as he looked at her with an unamused scowl on his face.

"I'm serious!"

"Don't worry, I believe you."

He sighed. "Good."

"If you had ever laid _that_, I'd say you'd probably already have my panties in your haori right now..." she grinned and pulled back each side of the vest as if to peek in and check, then she smiled up at him. "Nope, pretty sure I've still got them."

Naruto flinched, doing a double-take as he glanced and then turned away from Hinata up on the stage to gaze deep into the eyes of the girl from Kumo as she whispered to him, '_I think I love teasing you_.'

Her soft lips curved ever so slightly as a hand moved up to stroke just under the vest of his kimono. After a few minutes of locking eyes while Hinata took her first step forward after standing up onto her feet, Nobume tugged on his haori again and he could barely see her pearly white teeth underneath her embarrassed-looking smile just as nervousness set in and she took to staring at the folds of his kimono near his chest. "What are you thinking, Naruto-san?" The way she said his name made him shake. He hadn't even bothered to tell her not to call her 'san', because the way she said it stirred a flame in his belly.

Nobume wasn't totally different from all of the women he knew in Konoha. Every kunoichi in his age group was built a certain way. Because of their constant training, their bodies had lost their baby fat and their arms and legs turned into strong bundles of sinewy muscle that were taut and, aside the fat from their breasts, had little bounce or sag. Nobume's body was just perfect. It was soft, supple, but for some odd reason it reminded him a little of Hyuga-taichou's. _She must work out,_ he thought. Usually, civilians were a little less shapely all around unless they were models, and since those came far and in between, he was pretty sure he had not just snagged himself a model out of a hair dressing shop. Although he was curious about her and her past, he let it go for a while to watch the presentation. He tried his hardest to let go of her, Hyuga-taichou that is.

At the same time, Hinata brought her hands together and then extended her legs outwards as she released some of her chakra for a flashy show of some of her family jutsu. As she performed actions that she had been doing monotonously for ages to perfect them, she became lost in thought while her body continued on automatically, yet still gracefully. She thought about when she first met Naruto, then she thought of the night when they celebrated and almost kissed when she made ANBU, and how she felt when only a few days later he had made ANBU. She couldn't help but feel a little remorseful that he was a genin, in fact the only genin to ever make ANBU, technically anyone's subordinate on their team, and yet he was stronger than all of them.

Even with Naruto a few words away from holding a swooning girl in his arms and Hinata as busy as she should've been trying to focus on the presentation, they couldn't help but remember the soulless samurai that attacked Konoha, their withering morale and the night that Hyuga Hiashi died.

* * *

" 'Tou-san! '_Tou-san_!" She cried out, her hands reaching out desperately as she fell before the broken body of her father. Scattered around them were the empty shells of tar-covered samurai armor, uniform plates of steel and leather, silk and lacquer. Each piece of armor that lay around her and the rest of her three man cell was utterly decimated; meat torn and sliced prettily like only a master butcher could do. There were no bodies. To Hinata, the soulless samurai that attacked their village were once something to fear and loathe.

A single unit attacked the front gates earlier that day, undoubtedly to gauge Konoha's military strength and cunning. They weren't destroyed easily. It wasn't actually until the copy-cat ninja Hatake Kakashi split one's body in half with an exceptionally powerful Raikiri that the enchanted samurai armor finally stopped moving forward. When the last one was left 'alive' and intact, it scurried away much more quickly than it had advanced before leaving back over the hills just outside of Konoha that lead to the chain of rivers and lakes that made up the majority of Hi no Kuni.

Now, the only feeling in Hinata's body was strain and tension. Her mind fed her meager proportions of the memories that she gathered over the years of her father slowly coming to accept her, and eventually announce to the council and at the festival of the lion only six weeks ago that she was to be the next Hyuga clan leader. She may as well have been in paradise; who could see the day, when Hyuga Hiashi finally saw what so many others had long seen before him? Kurenai, her old team mates, Kiba and Shino, even the _Godaime _had been impressed with her potential in medical ninjutsu; Hinata had to decline a mentorship underneath the current Hokage to continue with her career in ANBU and as the future head of the Hyuga clan.

_N_ow, she thought solemnly, now that her Tou-san was gone, she was all alone. She swallowed pitifully as she gazed upon her father's face and noticed that it was paler than she had ever seen it.

He had always seemed rather pale. Now, his face reminded her of spilled white ink. His chakra, which had filled the air much like Kiba would say a musky scent would, had grown stale, but prevalent. It was the chakra-sensing equivalent of sitting in a room with a rotting corpse; Hinata calmly turned around and emptied her stomach on the floor behind her.

Looking up from the evidence of her folding stomach, she saw the bright blond hair of her fellow ANBU, Fox.

She felt disgusted. He had prepared for so long for what? For her father to make a martyr out of himself? For her to be alone again, without even a single parent to praise or love her? Was he going to take his place, the selfish bastard? Was he going to galavant down and sweep her off of her feet like in fairy tales and take responsibility for the loss that she has endured? _Would he even look her way after!_

She clenched her fingernails into the dirt and dragged them roughly against the ground until they were sitting near her hips. She wasn't naive anymore. Not when it came to love, anyways. She had tried, time and time again, to get his attention, but Naruto never gave her the time of day. Now, with the odd, cynical personality that he seemed to adopt from out of nowhere, like those three boys that he sometimes visited and trained with at the orphanage who were currently working on their chunin exams. Out of nowhere, he had changed, and suddenly he was interested and flirting, but she knew that it was just the way he had become. He did that with every girl; no woman held his heart. What he didn't understand was that she didn't just long for him to give her his heart, she ached with every fiber of her being to give him hers and for him to accept it.

But again, she wasn't naive. She couldn't pretend that he loved her, no matter what sort of words he said or actions he took. She didn't care how unfair that seemed to be to him, it was only fair to her that she had the last say in their relationship after years and years of waiting.

_Damn_ him! And _damn _everyone else... She shook violently as she glared at the floor, then she closed her eyes and tears began to well at their far corners.

"Hinata! Just stay back! Let everyone else handle them for now, I need to prepare more chakra!" He bellowed, his own body shaking in anticipation of a surprise attack while he was gathering the natural energy around him. He wasn't sure exactly what he was going to do with it, but he had already tried using the rasengan and some of the weaker variations of it, to no avail. He figured his next best bet was to dip his hand into the chakra that flowed around them in nature. If he could only get a little while longer, he would be able to spin the chakra into a small enough point that he could fit it into his tenketsu and allow it to explode all at once.

Hinata looked up and screamed, and from far away, Naruto felt his stomach drop like a rock in his abdomen. He knew that feeling that she felt. He had gone through life and death situations before, and had nearly lost many of his precious people, but it didn't seem like her father could be revived at this point. Hiashi had given it his all and utterly destroyed no less than forty suits of the enchanted samurai armor. How he did it, Naruto wasn't sure. He didn't have the Byakugan, but he was pretty sure that those suits didn't have any chakra coils, so the gentle fist shouldn't have done much.

Whatever Hiashi had augmented his attacks with was what Hinata needed. Hopefully, Naruto thought, the young Hyuga heiress,_ no_, the young head of the Hyuga clan, had surpassed her father.

"Hyuga-sama!" Beetle yelled, raising her arms up and clenching her fingers tightly without closing her hands into fists up above her head. "I'm right behind you!" And with a sudden burst of chakra, two large hands made of rock and soil reached up from the ground and then pressed down upon the surface of the Earth as they helped lift the gargantuan form of a slender woman out of the ground, immediately forming a large trench around Naruto just as another group of shinobi came up from behind him ready to assist in any way possible.

A man wearing a mask that only covered the top half of his face let out an amused grunt when he saw the woman with the beetle mask as her eyes suddenly began to roll back as her kekkai genkai overcame her. He was a mercenary hired from the capitol of Hi no Kuni where he served as an elite bodyguard to the daimyo. Konoha called for assistance at the beginning of the first wave after the initial attack, and he was one of the many Hi no Kuni shinobi, independent from Konoha, that was sent, for a price, to aid Konoha.

The man in the mask reached behind him and pulled out two shuriken with lengths of wire attached to them. Using his chakra, he threw both of the shuriken toward the crowd of soulless samurai.

He slammed his palms together fiercely and grinned, saying "Shuriken Kage Bunshin no Jutsu." Suddenly the two shuriken turned into a hundred, and he pulled, making the shuriken turn upwards and wrap around the behemoth as the sound of the wires stretching out met his ears. Molding the chakra and pushing it down to his legs, he dashed forward and leapt onto the shoulder of the woman that rose up from the dirt.

Beetle's eyes were still rolled back, but she brought her hands together and formed several seals for a Doton: Odama Doryudan.

There, he brought his hands together in a horse seal and then a tiger seal before he brought his hands together as if he were about to play an instrument like a harmonica or a small flute for a Katon: Karyudan, and then he pulled his arms away from his face and belched out a great big flame that engulfed the boulder-sized Earth bullets that Beetle formed and spat out from its mouth rather than from the typical Earth style dragon head.

Hinata had already started running. She was known as Bear among the ANBU ranks, and some of her superiors often joked around by calling her a cute little cub rather than a fearsome bear like the ones that they sometimes came across when camping out on longer missions in forests or by rivers. She already had a technique that she showed twice to Naruto and once to the person who destroyed their village not too long ago, leaving them to have to help rebuild it from scratch and devastating their ranking as a shinobi power for a long while. After that fight, she no longer called it 'Juhu Sohiken' (Gentle Step, Twin Lion Fists). She was followed by a large trail of very dense chakra that hopped and skipped around behind her like a trail of light. Instead of the lion head which was present only because it helped the user of the technique mold the chakra properly for the technique rather than just carrying it without form across mid range distances, she held a deep blue flame that was starting to completely engulf her arm. Just as she was about to strike, the chakra of the head suddenly expanded and the form of a large bear engulfed her arm and body as she devastated the first few enemies with a burst of chakra so condensed that it was visible from a much further distance than she herself was.

From far away, it looked like a demon beast was running about, rampaging against the groups of samurai armor. If anyone had the nerve to take a step closer, they may have noticed that the Hyuga girl was actually engulfed by a shield made of chakra that ate away at the armor while animalistic limbs and a head of chakra that was less condensed was there for aesthetic value more than anything else.

Fox nearly lost all of the chakra he had been gathering when he saw the bright light coming from Hinata as she barely touched the plates of armor, and yet her chakra mangled them and gnawed on them, tearing them apart as if the bear that she had created was actually tearing into meat and not steel. He quickly went back to work and used a tiny bit of it to send a small squad of kage bunshin after the girl. He didn't want her to die, and if she was as angry as he thought she was, she may just make the mistake that kills her if he's not there to stop her.

"Oh-ho!" The man in the mask chuckled, his grin visible although his eyes were not due to the odd mask. "So that little girl has some talent!"

"Shut up, fool! She is Hyuga Hinata-sama! She is the heir of Konoha's own Hyuga clan! The most prestigious in the village!"

"Tst! What a joke. The title doesn't make the shinobi... but I wonder why she's able to do damage like that?" He said and shot out another stream of fire as the large Earth clone continued to spit out mud boulders. Each of them drew from the bottom of the large woman's Earth body, and the more that she exerted herself, the shorter she became as her body now seemed to be sinking back into the Earth, currently shin deep. The boulders of fire exploded upon impact and knocked around several of the samurai.

"What do you mean?" Beetle called out, a confused look knitting her brows together.

"Doesn't the gentle fist only affect tenketsu, the use of chakra and the organs of the body?"

Beetle was silent for a moment and shook her head as she focused more chakra into the large, voluptous Earth woman. "I don't know..."

The masked man formed another few seals and spat a burst of water at a group of arrows that were shot up into the air at him. "So these bastards aren't _entirely_ mindless!" He was about to laugh, when suddenly the giant Earth woman's body lost everything from it's knees up to the middle of its abdomen as they crashed down to the floor and a cloud of dust filled the air. He turned to look back at Beetle, who was struggling to stand herself as a lone Samurai had made it past them and started hacking away at her, leaving her to defend herself with only a kunai in her hand.

"Shit." He muttered, and without another thought he jumped up into the air directly above the enemy. "Tsuyoi kaze ga fuki-ha!" He formed several hand seals: bird, hare, horse, ram; and then he pressed his palm up against his chest and pushed as he breathed out. Several sharp gusts of wind, like blades, tore through the samurai armor and left it a pile of heap in front of the girl. She looked up at him as he flew over her and landed behind her at the end of his jump off of the shoulder of the tyrant. Beetle turned around to look at him and he nodded. "Toss'er in."

She nodded and then turned back around to the giant who was crawling like someone whose body had been chopped in half and was desperately trying to gather her spilled organs back off of the floor. Beetle grunted and brought her hands together, palms flat, to concentrate on the chakra she needed to push more Earth element into her kekkai genkai. Suddenly, the giant was taller again, and as soon as she had feet, she stood up and then dropped herself down on a giant army, impaling herself on the suits of armor and absorbing some of them into her abdomen and her bosom. Even Hinata turned her head to watch as the giant girl's arms reached out and she scooped up as many of the invading samurai up against her as she could before the man in the mask took a leap back up into the air and landed on the small of her back. He reached for a group of the wires that he had wrapped around her and then jumped off.

"Too easy. _Katon: Dai Karyudan._" When he jumped back off of the giant's back a spark lit on the wires in his hands and it travelled along them until it hit the mud girl. Before them, a giant inferno had taken up a large section of the battlefield, turning the giant girl into a smoldering wasteland made up of melted steel. He dropped down to one knee, sweating and out of breath while Beetle tugged at him to back up from the front line. There were other shinobi fighting in different areas all around the village.

"We can't hold off this front on our own."

"Doesn't matter, we have to." As soon as the last of the samurai melted into the ground, the next wave stepped over the ash and boiling tar of their brethren to push on the attack. With a grim face, Beetle brought her hands together and slowly closed her eyes as she summoned as much chakra as possible to use with her Earth kekkai genkai. "There's no one else."

* * *

"How are Kurenai-san and Gai?" Kakashi asked impatiently, looking at the Godaime.

"The wounds they received were flesh wounds. Gai is already out on the battlefield again, but Kurenai nearly had her throat slit, so I ordered her to sit back and recover for a while longer. Besides, a genjutsu user is of no use to these things... None of hers have worked so far, anyways, and they are some of the best genjutsu that Konoha has to offer."

The white-haired man nodded, then looked back toward the front lines and shook his head. "We can't keep this up much longer... the samurai are very resilient. if only Jiraiya was here to help us figure out what makes these things keep coming... and why they even came here in the first place." For a brief second, he thought about the old man and asked himself why no one can ever die of old age as a shinobi... both him and the Sandaime were close enough to, but they both died out on the battlefield. "Where's Naruto?" He asked.

An ANBU wearing armored wrist guards and a plain black jumpsuit that even covered the top of his head behind his mask stood beside the Hokage. He was the Godaime Hokage's personal bodyguard appointed, of course, by the council. He was privy to more information than necessary, which meant he knew the identities of most of the ANBU out on the front lines. "Fox is still gathering chakra for an attack. I'm not sure what it is, but it must be pretty big."

"Probably his Rasenshuriken. It's the strongest attack that I've ever seen him use, but it doesn't hit that many targets... well, at least not enough to use here since he can only use it once or twice."

"That move doesn't take this much time to gather chakra, does it?" Tsunade asked, her eyes narrowed. "He must've been out there gathering that sage chakra for at least an hour or two now."

"It's not just that he's gathering the chakra, he has to condense the natural chakra flow around us to a small enough space so that it can be used for the jutsu. He's probably covered in warts and balding by now because of the sage chakra... but actually, it shouldn't take that long though... he must be trying something else?"

The ANBU made a face, but luckily no one noticed. "Does that technique make him really old, or something?"

Kakashi shook his head, "No, sage chakra turns him into a frog."

Again, the ANBU in the room with them made a face together with an audible hiccup.

* * *

"Chouji! Ino!"

"Right, Shikamaru!"

"Ready, captain!"

Shikamaru brought his hands together and could feel that same old odd sensation that he always felt when he molded chakra to use his shadow stretching techniques. He closed his eyes and molded more chakra, breathing out as his shadow suddenly widened out until it was at arms length on either side of him and then shot straight up toward the crowd of Samurai. Their armor shuddered as they were caught in the breadth of a giant shadow shaped like a tree. Shikamaru captured as many as he could as Ino leapt up into the air and threw down kunai with bushels of exploding tags attached to them. Meanwhile, Chouji was charging up his chakra and dragging these large chains around his body that fit loosely, until he inflated and turned into a giant ball and crushed the small platoon of samurai just before the exploding tags went off.

Chouji continued to roll about, crushing the empty shells easily, until Shikamaru let go of his hold on them and one of the samurai suddenly lifted its arm up and caught the rolling meat tank, stopping him in his tracks.

Shikamaru arched his brow and threw a line of exploding tags on the end of a kunai. "Get the hell out of there, Chouji!"

Chouji quickly began to back pedal as katana were jabbed and slashed against his spinning form. When he unrolled and fell back on his ass next to Shikamaru and Ino, he inspected himself briefly and then growled, standing up. "This is crazy. How can we spread out our forces like this? We're sitting ducks in teams of three this way." He looked toward another group and his gaze hardened. A samurai just pressed his sword up to the hilt into the abdomen of a chunin that Chouji had never formally met, but had seen at a few meetings and around the village a couple of times. He looked at Shikamaru, who shook his head.

"You're right, but these are the Hokage's orders. She's scared that if we don't stop them outside of the gates, we're doomed. She thinks we won't be able to defend ourselves against all of these lumps of metal from inside the gates." he said.

Ino smirked. "If one team fails though, that'll be it."

Shikamaru nodded slowly. "Probably... They just seem to keep coming back if you use regular attacks on them and most ninjutsu is pretty useless. I'm sure even someone like Naruto is having problems with them."

The three of them took a step back as the samurai finally managed to get back on their feet and start walking forward again. The crazy thing was that there was another group of about fifty right behind them, and they wouldn't move until after the ones in front were completely destroyed. They just stood there and waited.

Shikamaru narrowed his eyes. "Alright, Chouji. Extend your arm out and push that group back. Me and Ino are going to prepare a trap for these bastards."

The chubby ninja nodded and ran forward several steps, throwing a haymaker that pushed the entire group of samurai back several meters. He brought his arm back and stood in a very offensive stance, yelling, "Osu!"

* * *

"Tenten! Neji!" The two brown haired ninja turned to look back at their teammate who was bringing his hands together in front of his stomach. "Step back! I will devour them with the winds of the forests of Konoha!"

Neji grunted, acting as stoic as always, but not far from the surface were feelings of contempt and anger. He was furious. How could it be that these samurai were moving about if they weren't using chakra? Or if they were using chakra, why is it that he couldn't see tenketsu? Those chakra openings that every living being had; he was sure that there was some type of deviltry that made these puppets move en mass. He jumped back just as several spears shot out toward him and moved to hide behind a tree as arrows suddenly littered the floor where he had just been. After all. He could only use _Kaiten_ for so long.

Tenten threw a bundle of explosive tags over the crowd of samurai and brought her hands together to activate them just as they flew over the archers, destructively disarming some of them and throwing many off their feet and into the mud on the floor. The explosions heated up the tar that drenched them and made them look even more dangerous and evil. She watched the archers as they pulled themselves together and set up to attack once more while Lee finally opened the chakra floodgates to unlock a speed and strength that was strong enough to seriously damage the suits of enchanted armor.

"This is so pissing me off! Why can't these cowards come out and fight us themselves instead of just sending these hoards of zombies after us! Gah, they're not even zombies, they're like... ghosts in armor, or something." She said, complaining to herself because she knew that Neji and Lee weren't listening.

"Uooah! Konoha Senpu!"

She winced when she heard the loud humming sound of metal that was shaken by that monstrous kick. She pressed her back against a tree as arrows came flying after her as the group of samurai advanced. She heard several thuds as she shrunk her small frame up against the tree while she wondered whether or not it would be a good idea to peak out to try and help her teammate. From what she could hear, there were several other chunks of armor being destroyed and smashed, and she could hear the sound of crumpling soda cans whenever Lee used another spinning kick on the helmets of the "ghost samurai".

"Neji!" She called, looking over to him.

"What is it?" he called back, his byakugan activated and his eyes glaring at trunk of the tree. She tried her best not to laugh at the sight of him staring down the piece of bark, especially since she knew that he was actually looking almost everywhere else at once.

"Are the archers pointed at me?" She asked, pulling a scroll out of her kunai pouch and laying it on the floor in front of her as she gathered some chakra for a summoning spell.

"Yes. Hang on!" And with that said he reached into his pouch and procured an explosive tag and a kunai. After gaining their attention and running out toward Tenten, he timed his next divine spin just as a volley of arrows came within arm's length of striking him down. With that, Tenten was on the move with a club in her hands.

Together, the three of them kept changing the directions of the crowd's attention and slowly cornered them until Lee finally opened another gate and smashed them all with a single punch that was backed by all of the physical and spiritual chakra that was at his disposal. His fist only connected with the one in the first, or so it seemed. In reality, he moved so fast that even Neji couldn't keep track of his movements and saw a little bit more than Tenten saw. He was able to see the exact moment when Lee disappeared from his vision and suddenly the rest of the group started crumbling as if a strong gravity had suddenly pulled on them into a single space and they folded over like paper in the palm of a person's hand. When he was done, the group of samurai were all crushed into a tight mass of metal that was glowing red from heat. There was one samurai whose upper arms were still usable and so it continued to draw arrows and shoot a couple of times at Lee and then once at Neji, until Tenten walked over beside it and yanked away the bow and pulled the rest of the arrows out of the quiver at the same time. To their horror, it was still reaching out to them, but the rest of his torso had melted and attached to the mass and could no longer move.

Tenten sighed and pointed outward with the bow, her hand shaking slightly. "The next wave... it's on its way."

Lee shuddered as his power suddenly hitched and it left him briefly. He clenched his fists and glared in the direction of the advancing section of the army. "We will defeat them... I will not let them pass, even if it costs me my life!"

Neji looked at Tenten quietly for a moment and then pressed his palm on Lee's shoulder and nodded affirmatively, "Or mine."

Tenten discarded the bow and arrows and took her teammates other shoulder. "All of ours."

Lee and Tenten shared a grin while Neji smirked.

The three of them charged the platoon of their enemies together, crashing into the front of the army like waves at the beach.

* * *

She had not bothered to wear her mask. Hinata shook her head, taking several steps back as another group of samurai moved up from the back lines. This was getting them nowhere. Even setting up giant pits had been useless. They simply climbed out of them with inhuman strength, even going so far as to dig their way out with their gloved hands. They felt no pain. They never grew tired. Hinata and her squad, they were the ones getting tired. And still, Naruto was in the back charging up for some ultimate attack. At this point, she didn't care. She just hoped that whatever he was building up, it would be worth it.

"Oi! So you don't have any wind techniques or anything?" Groaned the masked man, apparently tired of pushing back the crowd of samurai who weren't affected very much by his blasts of fire. The damn things were even starting to shoot arrows, so the curvy woman in the beetle mask had to lift up another monstrosity. She formed a giant wall in front of them that forced them to try and climb the wall, which they were doing quite well until she concentrated her chakra and formed rock instead of mud or regular Earth out of the soil.

"No! I told you, I'm all Earth chakra! I can't even do a regular bunshin, damn it!" She spat out at him, glaring daggers at her attackers in front of her.

"I didn't ask you about bunshin, but how the hell did you make ANBU then?" He said, groaning. "Wind chakra seems to be working against them. I'm just cutting at their knees and joints and then all they can do is shake a little bit."

He was charging up for another attack when a spear went sailing through the air. His head tilted back once he noticed it coming and he closed his eyes, expecting it to pierce directly through the front of his throat under his chin. When his throat was still unpierced, he opened his eyes again to see the ANBU that had initially charged the army with her chakra attacks. Apparently she was a Hyuga, and a damn talented one at that. She was one of the few people who used chakra as an extension of her body like Hyuga Hiashi had been able to. The branch house genius that was famous for being 'the strongest' of the Hyuga clan for the past two or three years couldn't even come close to that. He saw the spear in her hand and how her chakra was starting to crawl around it like ribbons that extended out in spirals from her belly button until they formed a tangible mass around her hand and the weapon. "You're really scary, lady. Where's your captain, by the way?"

Her eyes were "As of right now, _I_ am acting captain of this squad. Bear-taichou. You? Where are you from, stranger?"

He grinned, tilting his head slightly. "Ah, that's right. I never did introduce myself." He was a hulk of a man, standing several heads taller than any of the suits of armor and wearing the mask that covered his eyes and the top of his head and a two piece jonin suit with a piece of red cloth tied around his waist and tied to one side. "Since you are Bear-taichou, the blondie is Fox-kun and the cutie-pie is Beetle, I'll choose something too... I'll be tortoise."

"How presumptuous. You are not ANBU." She said, patting the mask that was tied to her belt at the moment. He only looked into her eyes and watched as the veins around them pulsed every once in a while as she glared through him, past him and in him. He only smirked at her.

"For someone with eyes that can see beyond what normal eyes can see, you have very limited vision." he said.

Hinata rolled her eyes and started walking toward the group of samurai while twirling the spear in her hand as if she had practiced doing it all of her life. She walked carefully toward the group of samurai, easily deflecting their arrows and disarming them of their katana as she pushed the group back with jabs that punctured their bodies over and over. These monsters were deadly because they never hesitated, never flinched or feared anything or grew tired, but they were also quite easy to boss around by someone good enough to be able to deflect all of their attacks and continuously disarm them. However, Hinata could tell that her chakra pool was drying up and she would have to back off to rest or take a soldier pill eventually. She just hoped that Naruto... or Fox, was able to come up with something devastating.

She turned back to look at him and was surprised to see him walking toward them. He stopped by Eri, who had taken off her beetle mask as she looked at him and pressed her hands against his shoulders. He gripped her wrists and said something in her ear and she shook her head. He told her again and, this time, Hinata could see a different look in his eye. Eri nodded slowly, apparently complying with whatever he said, and she looked back up to him expectantly. Much to her disappointment, he simply turned and continued walking. When he stopped again, Tortoise was looking down on him and she really got a better observation of how tall the man was when she saw that Naruto's eye level was barely at the top of the man's stomach. She could hear him from here. Naruto was the first to speak.

"Move aside."

"You're Uzumaki Naruto, aren't ya?" the masked man asked, his grin devious almost.

"No. I'm Fox. Only Fox."

"Not Uzumaki Fox then? Maybe you're Naruto's twin brother?"

"When I release this chakra... if you're standing in my way then so be it, but do it a little closer to them."

"Oh," he said, walking away. "I was just leaving. Just wanted to say hello, and I can't wait to join you guys on our next mission together. I'll be on your team soon. You'll learn to like me later, I'm sure."

Fox shook his head and walked over calmly to Bear. She looked at him, uncertain what to make of this attack that he was going to unleash. She was starting to get antsy.

"Naruto? F-Fuck, Fox! What's going on?" She asked, irritated that after all of that time he was just going to go to them and tell them to retreat.

"Hinata..." he said, surprising her even more. She looked him in the eye and her byakugan disappeared. She felt her heart pounding with the way that he was looking at her.

"H-h-hai, Naruto-k-k..." She whispered, suddenly reverting back to the timid young girl who followed her crush around Konoha with a dream of becoming strong enough so that he'd look her in the eye... kind of like this.

When he kissed her, she was pleasantly surprised. When his hands grabbed her head and pulled her close once more after they parted for only a second to gasp for air, she felt like she was floating. When his hands started to roam, she was moaning in his mouth. She pushed back all of her feelings of guilt over her father's death as she shared this brief moment with her crush who she dreamt of night after night for so long. By the time the kiss was over, her thigh was pressing up against his and she was leaning into him from head to toe, feeling the hard calf of his left leg with her right foot as they shared their hidden passion for one another by themselves.

He let go and she shuddered ever so slightly. He looked her in the eyes and reached back up to cradle her head as he whispered into her ear. "I lied. To you, I'm Naruto with or without my mask; dead or alive, comatose or like a shooting star. I'm Naruto to you _always." _He stole her lips once more and she sighed contently as her eyes closed again.

"But Hinata. I need you to move. Go round up everyone you can and tell them to head back into the village gates. I'll let who I can know using kage bunshin, so just make sure you get back safe... oh, and if I die, please visit the orphanage and let the old lady that runs the place know. She'll introduce you to three young boys that I think you might like to meet."

"You won't die, because I won't..."

"Hinata, don't argue... go." he said, and with that he turned away from her and walked toward the advancing army. He saw no end in sight. They were walking out of the forest slowly and, from what he was able to see during their fights, as one group was destroyed another just filled the gap while the rest waited. He stood before the mass of evil that was infecting and sweeping the forest like a dark shadow that spanned the entire horizon. They had completely surrounded the village, from all sides, and there were no gaps in between the armies. They all walked at the same pace and even attacked in short bursts rather than striking as an entire body.

Hinata looked at him for a moment as he lifted his right hand up and brought his left to meet it.

_"Kage bunshin no jutsu!"_

Hinata's eyes widened as orange and blonde filled the area, suddenly pushing back the swarm of evil samurai. The two groups looked like two oils of different consistencies trying to separate after mixing together. She turned left, then right, then activated her Byakugan to look even further. She saw groups of the her fellow shinobi back up suddenly as the wall of Naruto's surrounded Konoha like a ring made up of sunlight to combat the darkness. When they all started molding chakra together and their bodies began to glow, it really did look that way. She looked at Naruto as he suddenly broke from the chain and stepped forward, standing in front of the clones that he created. He turned around and formed a rasengan in his hands. When he looked back up, he glared at her, "**Hinata! Get out of here!** I don't think I can control this once it's started, so **please! Leave!**"

Hinata looked on with wide eyes as she ran back toward the village, but kept within range of her byakugan.

She could faintly see Naruto running now, carrying the rasengan and holding it out in his left hand in front of each of the kage bunshin. They seemed to be putting some of their chakra into the orb as he was moving forward, but the sphere had also began to change shape. Halfway around the village, and Hinata knew because she was now standing up on the Hokage monument and looking down on him as he warned more shinobi away using his clones and continued to run as fast as he can along the chain of clones, she saw that he was now carrying a disk of chakra. Wondering what that meant, Hinata had to quicken her pace to move close enough so that she could see when suddenly a sharp headache made her deactivate her byakugan and stop running. As she looked down toward the ring of Naruto clones that surrounded the village, she couldn't help but wonder why there were so many rows of them if only the front row was going to help him condense the chakra that he was carrying.

When she figured Naruto probably reached the front gate, Hinata and the rest of the village could hear him and all of his clones belt out, "Shimatta, dattebayo!"

Hinata's eyes widened as powerful winds kicked up and suddenly the whole village broke out into fits of screaming and gasping and other downright cowardly noises coming from people who lived with and worked as shinobi. Suddenly she remembered that her father's body was still lying out there. She started running toward the front entrance to the village in a rush to get to him before Naruto's powerful wind attack could destroy his body. She wanted to bury her father, not find remains of him out on the battlefield after all of this was over!

As she ran forward, however, she saw that the walls were being torn up by this attack, and rooftops were literally sliding off either whole or in pieces from the winds created by his ring rasengan. Then the winds changed, and suddenly it wasn't every hard to run up toward him and his attack. In fact, her, together with shingles, vendor's stands and various goods from some of the stores nearby were being drawn in toward the center of the spinning winds. She used her chakra on her feet and eventually had to place her hands down on the floor and use those as well as she walked over toward a tree to hang on.

Nearby a building collapsed and a tree suddenly snapped in half. She looked at the one that she was holding and hoped that the girth of the tree would keep it from befalling the same fate as its kin. At least while she was around it.

Her father's body was long gone, she realized, and she tried to weather the storm as she looked at the hurricane that had appeared from nowhere and had engulfed the forest just outside of the village all around it, bouncing back and forth around the clones like a top spun with a string.

**Definitions for Terms used in this chapter: **

**Haori** - A coat men wear over their kimono

**Kage bunshin (no jutsu)** - There are different words for it, but the one I use is shadow clone (technique)

**Baba** - Grandma (Not 100% sure.)

**Hi no Kuni -** Land of Fire

**Raikiri - **An assassination attack based on speed and the strength of the user's affinity toward lightning chakra. A more advanced version of the 'Chidori'.

**Rasengan (used as "Rasengan" for plural in this chapter) -** Spiraling sphere

**Doton: Doryudan:** Earth Seal: Earth Dragon Bullet (The one Beetle uses is a variation of this one)

**Jentoru no seishin: Hāshu kyōda: **Gentle Spirit: Harsh swipe

**Tsuyoi kaze ga fuki-ha: **Powerful wind wave

**Katon: Karyudan:** Fire release: fire dragon missile ('Dai' Karyudan is just a 'large' fire dragon missile... although he doesn't necessarily use it as a missle, it's enough for him to light up the Earth woman with the wires)

**Konoha Senpu: **Leaf Whirlwind (spinning kick that Lee spams every once in a while)

**Author's note: **Thanks for waiting for the new chapter. I thought I had it ready to post like two weeks ago, but I kept needing to add more to it and more until it turned into this monstrosity. The next chapter will conclude the flashback and the festival and we can then move on to a little bit of fluff maybe. Anyone finding my OC's a little 2-D? Let me know in a review! I'll try to post the next one before Christmas since classes'll be out, huh? Anyways, I hope you all had a Happy Thanksgiving and that you have a Merry Christmas, Kwanzaa or Hanukkah. Anyways, happy hallowdays! :)


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